Peregrine and Blue Tit on the move

Unrelated movements I'll add, but both quite interesting nonetheless! At the weekend we were emailed the photo below of a Peregrine seen at Pointe de l'Herbaudière, Ile Noirmoutier in western France. It's a bit hard to make out in the photo, but the ring was read by two people as Yellow JF, which makes it a bird we ringed as a chick at Kenidjack in May this year. This is a really interesting movement in its first winter (some 417km), but not unprecedented, with one other Cornish-ringed Peregrine seen in France.

Our second exciting movement of the day came from a new ringing site near Predannack, where a wild bird seed crop has been planted at Teneriffe Farm. Our morning session didn't catch many of the finches (Chaf, Green and Linnet) in the field, but did produce a surprisingly large number of Blue Tits. One of these was already ringed though (with a group ring), so we presumed it was from a Lizard garden just a few kilometres away, but it was in fact a bird ringed as a nestling at Bonallack, near Gweek, some 10km from Predannack. This doesn't seem the longest of movements, but in the Blue Tit world it's quite impressive!

L930113 had been moving so fast it even came out blurred in all my photos!

The fields at Predannack do look quite promising though, with over 110 Skylark in two large fields and a good scattering of finches and even the odd Snipe, Lapwing and Golden Plover. A couple of brief calls very reminiscent of Red-throated Pipit also livened up the morning, but we never managed to pin that one down...

Sunrise at Predannack - for no reason!

Thanks to Dominique Robard for reporting and photographing the Peregrine in France.

Pulli weekend

It's that time of year when we're pretty occupied ringing pulli and this weekend was no exception. Friday saw us ringing the last few nestbox tits, including these Blue Tits (two of the five ringed) from the camera box on the side of my Lizard house. They're actually quite late, as most of the birds being monitored by University of Exeter students have already fledged or are close to.

I was also able to join Dale Jackson to ring one of the numerous broods of Peregrines he monitors and rings on behalf of the ringing group. They've not had the best year so far, with only 17 birds ringed (and colour-ringed) so far, compared to 25 in a 'normal' year - if that exists these days!

It's been a long time since I've jumared (you'll get the idea here),
so getting back up from this nest was hard work!

We were also able to revisit a few local Barn Owl sites that we either hadn't got round to yet, or had eggs/small chicks at the previous visit. We ringed a few broods of four (with a couple of smaller chicks going unringed), including this very smart-looking bird near St Keverne. But not all were so far advanced, with one bird near Gweek still sat on six eggs...

At least three of our sites still have birds on eggs,
which may well be replacement broods after failures

While we were in the area, we were also able to drop in and ring a brood of Song Thrushes in one of Greg's nestbox woods. The brood of four were a good size for ringing and were obvously hungry...

What's for tea!

With some of our urban gulls growing up wuick we'll no doubt be visiting a few Falmouth rooftops soon and then back over to Mullion Island for some Great Black-backed Gulls!