We had a fantastic April NERD Club meeting yesterday in beautiful weather. The bluebells are now almost fully out so the nest box checks in the woods were absolutely wonderful.
We now have 12 nests with eggs and two at least are incubating. It seems like we have blue tits and great tits in the boxes and possibly one tree sparrow (the box nearest to the main road)
We now enter a period where some nest boxes will not be checked during incubation to avoid disturbance.
Paul Baker came back to do bird ringing. He explained to us that, because the tits were close to incubation, and more vulnerable to disturbance, we would not catch birds near the feeders. Instead we set the nets in the trees to try and catch warblers, which would not have started nesting yet.
We caught a couple of wrens, two gold crests, a willow warbler – which must have been very newly arrived after its migration from Africa, a chiff chaff and a couple of long tailed tits. One of the gold crests had been caught and ringed by us in February last year.
The dippers at the nest which we had gone to visit on the march meeting hatched chicks about 13 days ago and so was perfect timing to ring the babies. Back in March we visited the nest and learned that Dippers build an entrance passage which points downwards but then has a lip to get into the nest itself (which stops the chicks falling into the water).
Paul and his assistant Emma carefully gathered the chicks from the nest and we ringed the cute chicks which had big yellow gapes and tufty soft feathers sticking out of their heads
After pizza and snacks we headed out just before dusk for badger watching. We were really lucky to see at least four separate badgers. The badgers spent a good amount of time around the sett and we had a good half hour watching them before it got too dark and we headed back. We managed to make it in and out without alerting the badgers to our presence which was great. We hope to return when the babies, which will be in the set at the moment, emerging in May.
Upper Woodburn 