A good start on Sunday at my ringing site at Jerbourg with two nets open 18 metre and a 12 m I started cutting and clearing some more of the net rides but gave up after the first round with a good number of birds in the netting area and with good numbers of swallows migrating through and swooping round the nets after insects . I ended up with a total of 54 new birds which included 9 Black Caps 2 Firecrest 1 house sparrow 1  chiffchaff  41  swallows a good number with only two nets open and only given a pass for three hours by the boss indoors had to get home to look after the kids . So she could go to work going to have to get this sorted?

With eight weeks of ringing at the Claire Mare reedbeds over it is now time to move the nets to Jerboug for the rest of the autumn ringing season though sedge warbler's were in quite good numbers this year I noticed a higher percentage of adults too juvenile reed warbler's were very disappointing with numbers declining each year it is a worrying trend nearly all the reed warbler's that were caught were possibly migrants migration back South as I only ring 3 that I coded 3J so it makes me wonder whether we're going to lose reed warbler as a breeding species at this reed bed . We really do need to look at what is going on . Best of birds caught at the Clair Mare was aquatic warbler melodious warbler and two kingfishers. Fingers crossed for the weather to be kind to me this year at Jerboug as the last couple years has been washout with the weather.

Aquatic warbler on the left sedge warbler on the right  

melodious warblerAdd caption

Kingfisher

   

With a poor start to the spring ringing season it did not get much better with clear nights most migrants passed straight overhead though we did managed to catch and ring some migrants as always spring is very hit and miss  in Guernsey the best bird of spring migration was a golden oriel a new ringing tick for me I did spend a couple of days in Alderney at the latter end of spring migration one interesting part was one evening catching swallows on the migration North I managed to catch  several juvenile swallows it was too early for these to be from the local breeding population I believe that these birds are from breeding swallows in southern Europe and joining up with swallows migrating north. In May  we started the seabird season  starting with   a week at our local tip with the North Thames Gull group this is something that we have been doing for several years now organised by Paul varon who's been doing a colouring project with our local breeding population of gull for several years the target species being lesser black backed gulls though we colouring all gull species which has been a great success with so much more being learnt about the movement of gulls and is now giving us a greater understanding of these great birds and their life the general seabird ringing this year it was quite a good season though we did not manage to get out as much as I would like to do we managed to colouring a good sample of greater cormorants and the small sample of shags with the shags showing a better breeding season than last year in July a small group of us went up to Burhou for two nights of ringing storm petrels again this trip proved to be a great success with 389 new birds ring and a total of 114 re-traps 

After a long mild winter , I was hoping that the spring migration would be somewhat better, but with clear nights . A lot of our migration is going overhead with only a scattering of birds making landfall though it seems migration has been very slow this year with birds being held up in Africa and southern Europe due to weather conditions. We can only hope that the next couple weeks get better . It has been that slow that I'm not even tried for swallows of an evening I was hoping to get up to Alderney this weekend with the winds all week being a light force 1 to 2 and from the south the south-east but as always the forecast changes to the weekend with northerly winds predicted 5 to 6 will have to cancel my trip fingers crossed for next weekend but hey no a more cheerful note we did manage today to get up to the humps with the help of  the Guernsey Sea fisheries, who took a team of four of us to Godin, we left St Peter Port harbour at about 8.50 and headed to the humps on the way up . We passed jethou and Herm
we managed to count at least 18 puffins on the water. As we got closer to the humps. There is also a good number of guillemots rafting nearby. After about 20 min. We held just of Godin on the Leopard S the sea fisheries boat while they launched the rip myself. Paul Catherine and Vic were put ashore once ashore, we had a small discussion on how to approach the cormorants as this some of the chicks were quite big, it was decided that we would take one nest at a time and and tried to round the bigger chicks back towards the nests. This seem to work well as we approach each nest and with keeping the birds tight to each other. We would place a blanket over four or five birds. This is the first time we have used this method and it definitely helps keep the birds calm while I metal ring and Paul putting the colour rings on. We moved slowly through the nesting site keeping a tight ring round the birds as yet I do not have the exact number of birds that we managed to ring as Catherine was taking the ring numbers and the colouring as myself and Paul rung the birds Vic had brought some slate and some broken patio slabs with him so that we could try to give the common terms chicks somewhere to hide and give them some protection from the gulls after last year. Fingers crossed they return