The Second Coming

Picture yours truly, sat in his new house in Leeds after returning to the city to spend his final year studying his degree. After a morning of a long breakfast and an episode of Breaking Bad, which everyone in the world seems to be watching, he pulls up a chair to his desk and opens his laptop. The start button flashes blue as he presses it and, once its loaded, finds his way to the Blogger log in screen. After typing in his unnecessarily long password, Close Encounters of the Bird Kind opens up before him. After deleting a few old drafts that were half started over the summer, he opens up a brand new entry and reclines in his chair, hands on the back of his head as he lets out a contented sigh.

It's good to be back.

Right then, where to begin? Well I guess first off I'll give you a synopsis of the Summer...

First of all I got a job. I was leading cave tours around Creswell Crags, which has been mentioned in at least two posts on here before. Apart from being fantastic, it also allowed me to see some top wildlife. But looking through the hundreds of pictures I have taken over the summer, it can essentially be summed up in two words - Bird ringing and Moths.

Brace yourself, there's going to be a lot of pictures.

Lets start with the moths. You already have the background to my nocturnal Lepidopteran (fancy word for moths and butterflies) adventure from the previous blog post "Moth-ing?". So we'll skip the formalities and get straight to the juicy stuff. What follows are pictures of moths that were attracted to the light in my garden or found around the house.

Swallow Tailed Moth

Marbled Beauty

Fan-foot

Common Emerald

The Snout

Silver Y

Herald

 So there's a selection of the moths that I had attracted or seen around. You may have noticed that the last picture is sat on a rock. That's because I found him deep in a cave with lots of other moths called "The Tissue", where I think it was just taking refuge before it got dark again.

And before we get all birdy, here are a couple of friends that came to keep me company one night when I was mothing...

The Hendgehog that came snuffling around my feet...

...and the Wood Mouse that was knawing on the feeder a few feet away!

 Now lets move onto the birds. We'll start with a pretty special one.

Thanks for finding this nest goes to Dean and his wife Mel, who were conducting a Breeding Bird Survey and came across this stunning species. After careful observations they found the nest and we were able to ring it. But enough of the teasing...

This is a picture taken by the climber when we conducted a check to see whether they were big enough to ring. Any ideas?

 They are of course... Hobbys!

When we went back over a week later, the climber once again went up to the nest and passed us the two birds down. He had shouted down that one of them was heavily entangled in bailer twine (which you can see on the first picture above) so that it was being held face down in the nest. He managed to free it from the nest and pass it down to us on the ground. It was in a really bad way and had twine covering its entire body. The first chick was growing really well and was ringed straight away so it could be placed back into the bag so as not to stress it out. My trainer then went to work on twine on the second bird, if she can get a badly tangled Wren out of a mist net then we had faith she could do it!
It became apparent that it was severely constricting the birds right leg, so much so that it had changed the colour of the leg to pink rather than yellow. Incredibly, after patiently working her way through the twine, she managed to completely free the chick. As luck would have it, Dean (who found the nest), is a physiotherapist, and so advised that we slowly massage the leg to increase the blood flow. Miraculously it started to move its toes and grip onto my ringers fingers. Obviously we were unable to ring its right leg, so a ring was placed on its left leg and the BTO were informed.
If we hadn't turned up to ring the chicks then I have no doubt that the chick would have died within a few days and we at least gave it a fighting chance. Dean and his wife have since been back to the site and saw at least one juvenile had fledged, and were confident that there was another calling from within the tree that had the nest. Fingers crossed the second chick made it too!

First chick - a picture of healthiness

The second chick after being freed from the twine. The effects of constriction on its right leg are clear.

 What follows is just a gallery of some of the birds we caught over the summer, enjoy!

Tree Pipit

Reed Warbler

Goldfinch

Grasshopper Warbler

Willow Tit

Greenfinch

After missing out on a Sparrowhawk for the 4 years that I've been going bird ringing, it was finally a joy to be able to ring one. This stunning first year male did a right job on my fingers with his talons, but I think I can forgive him as he turned up on my final morning before heading back to university.

What a send off!