First CES juveniles of the year

This morning we braved the mud at Gunwalloe again to do CES visit 3, and were pleasantly surprised by the results. After a few years of quite low early-season catches, the standard nets (400' of them) produced 28 birds with an additional 30' net producing an impressive 15 birds!

Captures so far by CES visit in 2015 (shown in red) look quite good compared to the last couple of years

Aside from the standard warbler fare (including both Reed and Sedge Warbler originally ringed in 2011), we caught our first recently-fledged juveniles of the year, in the form of a Robin and a Dunnock...

...with the additional highlight of two controls (birds ringed elsewhere). The Blackcap below was ringed at Nanjizal, near Land's End (see more here), in September last year and we also caught a Reed Warbler originally ringed as a breeding male on the Isles of Scilly in June 2013. The latter bird is interesting as it appears to have switched breeding site by quite a way north.

One last distraction whilst on the way to check out a small Sand Martin colony was a female Stonechat carrying food that we eventually pinned down to a small area of open dune grassland. A quick search revealed a brood of two half-grown chicks which were duly ringed and returned to home.

Rather small Stonechat chick