Retrapping Adults for Survival

As it was Bank Holiday Monday, me and my dad were out ringing for the second time of the long weekend. Today we were working on our RAS (Re-trapping Adults for Survival) project. You can find out more about the RAS project on the BTO website by clicking here. With this project we are trying to catch as many Blackcaps as we can; so far we are on 29 encounters, 27 of which were new and of course 2 of which were re-traps.

We think there are 25+ breeding pairs in the site we were ringing at, all of which owning territories in different parts of the wood, however working out those territories can be quite difficult which makes catching the birds also difficult. For instance if you are only slightly out of the bird's territory range, you won't catch it (as I said it can be quite difficult).

Over the last couple of weeks we have been catching a steady number of  birds perhaps 6 or 8 a session, which is quite a reasonable amount, however disappointingly we only caught one today (of course the session is still as enjoyable as ever); however we don't just catch Blackcaps when we put nets up in random places, we also catch any other bird flying through the nets path. Today we caught a lovely fledged Long Tailed Tit easily distinguished from the adult.

This is our second year of the RAS project and each year the information becomes more and more meaningful.

Linking to Wild Bird Wednesday