Southern Colour Ringing Group

30 March 2019

Today we made our first visit to Netherhall to undertake the Heronry survey. Only 27 nests this year so ten nests down from last year. There are several trees down on the island which has reduced the nests available. However, with the warm spring things are early and there were three or four young that are very close to fledging and were too big to attempt to ring. We also recorded our earliest three Little Egret nests one with five eggs already.

24 May 2018

Today was a concerted effort at the final Herons and Egrets. We however had no idea what awaited us on Walthamstow No 1 Island. Assuming (correclty) that we were too late for most of the Herons and we were just going to do a nest survey we had not counted on the large Egret colony that there is on this island. Final count for the day was a total of 21 Heron nests and 19 Egret nests. Many of the Egret nests had young of the correct size to ring. Unfortunately we had not considerd there would be such a large amount and we had only taken 14 colour rings out with us. This resulted in the final 10 birds at Walthamstow only being ringed with metal rings and no colour rings. Given we were also planning to do the final three nests at Netherhall that evening a few hurried calls secured another ten colour rings from a ringer on the other side of Herts. We drove across to collect and just made it back to the farm to collect the boat in time where Rob ringed a bonus brood of Jackdaws in one of the owl boxes before we left. At Netherhall we managed to get two more broods colour ringing another six Little Egrets. This bought the day total to 30 Little Egrets of which 20 were colour ringed. A great effort by all  the team and thanks to London Wildlife Trust and the Thames Water fisheries team for their support and ferrying on the boat out to the Island.

16 May 2018

Due to three nests (one Egret and two Herons) being ready to do today we took what we thought was going to be a final trip out for 2018. A successful trip with all three nests ringed resulting in 4 more Egrets and 3 more Herons. However, it was clear that there were three Egret nests just hatched that would potenitally give 10 Egrets chicks to ring in about ten days time. It is probably going to be worth another trip out to ring these three nests as they will all be ready on the same day. So it does look like we will make five trips out this year which will result in an excellent total of Herons and Egrets for 2018.