We drove down yesterday, arriving late afternoon so not much time for birdie stuff. A look around this morning showed very few birds in the house area, not even many House Sparrows, which is a bit strange. This afternoon I decided to have a look at the stream site at the bottom of the property.
Put the first net up (6m) and there appeared to be few birds about, but as I was putting the next up l looked back to see a stream of birds going into the first net. I made the mistake of leaving the second net half up and cleared the first. It was full of Redpoll and from then on it was hectic, not helped by having to clear birds out of the half errected net and furl it.
Ended up catching 59 birds in under 2 hours. All but 2 were Redpolls the exceptions were 1 Silvereye and a Goldfinch. All birds were unbanded and almost all the Redpoll were young birds with only a few judged to be not in their first year.
 |
| Most birds were young, some like this one recently fledged others were starting to get their Red Poll. |
 |
| A few birds were moulting their tail feathers. I don't know much about tail moult but these appeared to be moulting the lot at once. |
 |
| A few were moulting their primaries. This one was out of sequence but was doing the other wing as normal |
 |
This was the only one caught showing any redish body colour.
Down here for about 10 days so will hopefully catch a few more.
|
Looks like you hit a large party of families there Peter. They look very much like Lessers and with those numbers, they look to be very successful.
ReplyDelete