Queenstown - plenty of Silver

We have been down Littles Road since Saturday and had planed to start some banding on Sunday but my plans went very much astray. Caught a couple of birds in the neighbours hen house but when I went to band them found I had no pliers. They had been put in the wrong box when we packed up at the Quarry on Friday, A quick call to Sandra confirmed where they were and she made arrangments to courier them down. I did have an attempt at banding on Monday using convential pliers but this proved very difficult. I couldn't keep up with the catch from one net and I wasn't happy with some of the bands, so I abandoned the attempt.

The pliers arrived down this afternoon so I got a couple of hours in. There are a huge number of Silvereyes feeding on damaged fruit that I had tipped out on the lawn so it was no trouble catching a few.

The combined total of birds caught at various attempts is 82 ot 5 species with 66 new and 16 recaps
House Sparrow - 2 (1)
Chaffinch - 2 (0)
Silvereye - 59 (12) included in the recaps was a bird banded 21 Sept 15 about a week after starting to band here. At 982 days from banding it is now the oldest bird recaptured.
Bellbird - 1 (3) included in the recaps was the oldest Bellbird recaptured.
Tui- 2 (0)

One of the tui was a ist year bird but this one was an old fella.