After quite a time gap we had a session at the Quarry on Friday morning. Although the catch was small there were still a few interesting birds. The nets were set around a fruiting Arbutus tree laden with fruit. It has been a few years since we last attempted to catch birds around this tree. In the meantime, it has grown considerably bigger especially in height meaning that birds mostly flew over the nets, carrying fruit in their beaks well above the nets. All a bit frustrating.
We caught 9 birds in all; 2 recaptures, a Chaffinch and a Blackbird. Also 7 new consisting of 2 Blackbirds, 2 Silvereye and one each of House Sparrow, Dunnock and the star of the day a Kingfisher. Only the second to be caught at the Quarry in the 7 years we have been banding there. We have banded about 30 Kingfisher puli during this time but only 2 non banded birds have made it into a net.
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| Della proudly displaying her Kingfisher. |
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| The Pointy end |
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| About to be released. |
The Chaffinch was banded 25 May 2018 and at 2184 days from banding is now our oldest recap of any species.
Recent Harrier Banding
In the last month or so we have banded about 30 Harriers and made 18 recaptures. Most of the birds have been caught in the Lakeside area with others at our Cashmere Rd site and at Motukarara where Phil continues to catch new birds regularly. All the recaptures have been made in a relatively short distance of their original banding site. One recap of particular interest was the third bird in this project to be colour banded, just on two years after being banded.
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| The Bands |
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| The bird as a 2yr old with eyes going yellow |
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| The Brown Eye when originally banded. |
One of the recaptured birds had a leg that had obviously been broken and had healed crooked.
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| The broken leg, nearest camera. |
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