October on the Wash

Looking at my blog recently I realised that I haven’t posted anything for ages and ages. This is, in part, due to the fact that I haven’t done much ringing in the past few months. It may also be down to a little bit of laziness in writing posts!

So, what have I been up to? Well, in October, I headed over to join WWRG for the weekend. After setting three nets on Snettisham Beach on Friday night, we were back nice and early on Saturday morning for the catch. The beach had plenty of grey waders on it and it didn’t take long before the command to ‘fire’ came through the radio and we were running to the nets to extract 533 sanderling, knot, grey plover and dunlin. It was a lovely catch with lots of great data gathered from the large number of sanderling re-traps (almost a third of the birds were already ringed).

Let no one ever say that ringers are lazy…no sooner had we finished breakfast than we were re-filling the trailer and tootling back down to Heacham to set two large mesh nets for a potential catch of oystercatchers that evening. We settled back in the sunshine and Richard read a few flags on curlew while we waited for the birds to turn up. Sadly, something about the beach, the tide, the weather, the whim of the birds made them decide not to come to the beach that evening so we had to undertake the frustrating task of picking up the un-fired nets before heading home for an early night!

On Sunday morning we split up into groups to go colour-ring re-sighting. I went to Snettisham Pits, where, in all honesty, I spent most of my time playing with my new camera lens! We were lucky enough to witness a spectacular roost which included approximately 55k knot and 28k oystercatchers. It also included one avocet with an identity crisis that sports flag M8. This slightly confused individual was apparently adopted by oystercatchers as a chick and seems to now spend its time exclusively with this species! For more info and pics, see the BTO’s blog: http://btoringing.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/adopted-avocet-suffers-identity-crisis.html

As usual, it was a great weekend spent with good friends!

Waders at Snettisham

Knot flock at Snettisham