Zoo Saturday 18 July - Rain affected play

On Saturday morning the weather looked doubtful with rain threatening and a brisk northerly blowing. However with a dire forecast for the next few days we decided to go ahead and get some nets up and see what happened. As it turned out the wind dropped and the rain held off so we had good banding conditions for a period. Unfortunately rain set in later in the morning and we took the nets down a good couple of hours earlier then usual.

Despite the weather we still caught 104 birds and had a good turn out of people.  Beside the more experienced banders there were a number of enthusiastic new folk.

A busy banding station

Little Rata getting his first closeup view of a Silvereye.

There were 6 species caught with 72 new and 32 recaptures. (Recaps are in brackets)
Blackbird - 1 (0)
Chaffinch - 2 (1)
Greenfinch - 21 (5) the oldest recap was banded July 2012
House Sparrow - 10 (2) the oldest banded May 2013
Yellowhammer - 4 (0) I thought I had a recap until I checked and found it had just been banded.
Silvereye - 34 (27) The oldest banded May 2007. This bird was also captured last month and at the session we held at the other end of the Zoo 3 weeks ago. Hopefully it will stick around a bit longer and make it into the 3000 days from banding club.

This club has only 1 Zoo Silvereye in it at the moment but 9 from other sites. The membership of the 3000 club is currently 4 Blackbird, 1 Chaffinch, 10 Silvereye, 6 Starling and 5 Tui.