Late November

On Wednesday 25th, and Friday 27th, Jerry was working on the fence-lines from mid morning to mid afternoon, and in the 4/5 hours he was there put up nets 4 -7. Catching was slow, probably not helped with him working close to the nets. The weather on Wednesday was good (overcast with a light breeze), but it all changed for Friday with a foggy and frosty start (zero at mid morning with ice on some of the "drinkers"). When it started to thaw (only getting to +4 by mid afternoon), the nets quickly got wet, and the trees were constantly dripping. The fog didn't clear until early afternoon, and it was 3 hours before the first bird was caught. The catches were just 3 + (3) on 25th, and (2) on 27th, made up of Robin (1), Dunnock (1), Song Thrush 1 + (1), Blue Tit 1 + (2) and Lesser Redpoll 1. At least he made good progress with the maintenance work, helped by Andy (visiting on Friday), when he came to collect the ringing kit for a session at his garden feeders.

On Saturday, Andy had a foggy three hours, for a catch of 21 + (10), comprising mainly "tits" - 62% of which were adults. The catch comprised Robin 1, Blue Tit 14 + (4), Coal Tit 1 + (3), Great Tit 4 + (3) and House Sparrow 1. The best of which was a Coal Tit, originally ringed 27/11/2013, which set a new longevity record (for the Lake) when re-caught on 29/11/2019, now extended by "a year" to 7 years 1 day. We are considering registering the Pennorth feeders as a site for the new BTO "winter ringing 2020/20 project", but suspect the catches will be mainly tits, and not enough of the target finches, to be accepted.

On Sunday 29th, Alan J, Andy, Jerry and Peter tried the Pennorth bird-crop again (as another horse event was being help around the Llangorse crop fields), but it was a foggy day, and the nets were clearly visible against the white blanket. The catch was just 11, made up of Wren 1, Linnet 3, Yellowhammer 1 and Reed Bunting 6. The Linnet flock still held about 150 birds, but there may have been fewer Reed Bunting than on the last visit, but difficult to estimate as "ones and twos" were spread throughout the crop.

November ended with 155 ringed - ranked 7th of the last 10 years (when November catches increased with the bird-crop ringing), and our YTD becoming 2133.

These 8 photo's compare last weeks views (taken from a similar position) to this weeks!

This was about as good as it got with the fog today. It definitely got worse at times.

It always seemed that we were close to the top of the low fog today, the spectacular views from the A470 on the way home of the fog in the valley showed we were probably right.