C-ringing

After 9 painful weeks of waiting daily by the pigeon holes for the post to be delivered, I finally got my C-permit! Since then I've done far less ringing than I'd planned, thanks partly to the weather and partly due to my reluctance to get up early if I havent set a time to be somewhere (at 5.30 in the morning, bed is REALLY attractive).

But I've caught a lot of interesting birds at my home site in the college orchard, including 2 ringing ticks (Green woodpecker and Mistle thrush) and loads of blackbirds. There is also a Tawny owl flying round every night who I've tried to catch but have, so far, failed. He will sound so much better with a ring on.

So where am I now? Term has just ended, at a very inconvenient time for me (I have just started ringing at another site and wanted to see what more it could offer before vanishing 'home' home for easter), so I'm looking into sites here. I've had a net up in the garden all day today, catching a wonderful total of 2: 1 Blackbird and 1 House sparrow. To be fair, the sun was on the net most of the day and the wind was rustling it too, so I wasnt expecting much.

Yesterday I was out swan catching with Kane - I really do love swans, they're beautiful and they make the most amazing soft grunting noise to one another. Catching them is really rewarding too, because it's more effort both physically (as my muscles are feeling today) and mentally (trying to disguise your body language so that it say 'innocent bystander feeding the swans' rather than 'I'm a ringer trying to catch you' to them). We also caught a few other birds by hand - black headed gulls, mallard and a Jackdaw! This was particularly exciting to me, as it is another ringing tick and also my first corvid.