On Friday we had a session at Jan's place on Kennedys Bush Rd next to the Halswell Quarry. With only four of us and a huge number of birds we were kept very busy. In total we processed 122 birds with by far the most being Silvereyes with 111 new and 11 recaptures. The only others banded were 7 House Sparrows and 3 Greenfinch, all new. The low numbers of non-Silvereyes was probably that with someone at the nets almost constantly extracting Silvereyes the more wary species stayed away. With just 10m of net up, 1x6m, 1x4m, there wasn't much room for birds to squeeze in.
The team consisted of Jan, our host and bag carrier, general helper and coffee maker, Kenny the chief bander, Chris extracting and bander of birds and yours truly keeping out of the way of the workers.
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| Jan busy carrying bags between other duties. |
Amongst the recaps were several banded in 2019 with 2 that were banded on 1 Aug 2019 which are now our oldest recaptured Silvereyes. Interestingly this was the first time that they have been recaptured as was also the case with a couple of other older recaps. It would appear that after an absence of several years a flock of Silvereyes have returned to the area, perhaps because of recent snow falls.
A number of the Silvereyes were suffering from what appears to be Pox lesions. As we do not usually get many poxy birds at this site, I suspect that they have arrived recently, possibly with a flock including the older recaps.
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| Several birds had Pox above the bill, possibly due to getting infected when extracting berries from a thorny bush. |
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| One of the worst pox cases. I don't think that the bird's future is very bright. |
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| I don't think this is pox but possibly due to some sort of mite infection. We have had about 1-2 cases per year for the last few years. |
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