Due to staff shortages, I have been based mostly at Holme Bird Observatory this year and not been able to spend much time at Walsey Hills, our little hill top scrub reserve in Cley-next-the-sea. For the last few weeks, I’ve been able to spend a bit more time there but have spent a lot of time catching up with strimming and habitat management.

However, this morning the conditions were good for ringing. I captured 30 birds across the day with 24 of them being juvenile Blue Tit. Needless to say my fingers were a little bit sore by the end of the day. Non-ringers probably won’t know, but Blue Tit are notoriously pretty feisty and bitey, and not many ringers favourite bird to get in a net, especially if you have lots of them….

Blue Tit are one of the best birds for training on how to age birds and learning moult strategy, with juvenile Blue Tits (like most passerines) undertaking a post-juvenile moult where they replace some juvenile feathers but retain others. The Blue Tit had all started their post-juvenile moult, replacing juvenile greater coverts and adult-type feathers like in the picture below. You can see two new replaced greater coverts coming through feather sheaths which are much bluer than the duller grey-ish juvenile greater coverts.  We can use this feature to age this bird now and later in the year as they will keep some of these old grey juvenile feathers until after their first breeding season next year, where they will do a complete post-breeding moult completely replacing every feather.

Wing of a Blue Tit in post-juvenile moult

I also caught 2 Great Tit, 1 Chaffinch, 1 Dunnock, 1 Greenfinch, and finally, the bird of the day, a juvenile Stonechat! Stonechat are not a bird I see often really close to Walsey itself, though you can see them on the wider NWT reserve, so I was pretty shocked to find one in the net. Having checked through the records I was even more shocked to learn it was the first Stonechat ever ringed at Walsey! Lovely little bird.

Juvenile Stonechat

With the wet weather there were lots of little Common Toad on the move on the paths and it was lovely to see an adult Common Lizard basking in the sun next to the bunker. Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper and Wall Brown were all on the wing around the bunker.

Shannon Clifford – Assistant Warden