Wednesday 11 July
The trip started early for Cathy and Tim who met the plumber who had come on Wednesday to improve the flushing rate of loos – it seems to have worked well. Cathy then took the opportunity to do the shopping for the weekend and started cleaning on Thursday, with more cleaning on Friday (it now looks like we have a new oven).
So our second week started with brunch at 11:00 hrs after a few hours sleep following our first overnight mist-netting session. We headed out to recce/scan the new waterpark (under development) and the rice paddies at Taoizini to look for both mist-netting options for that night on the paddy fields and future canon-netting options on the water park. We set nets on two rice paddies again and had another amazing night with with 299 birds caught including six Spoon-billed Sandpipers (SBS) – amazing. Back to the hotel and bed at dawn this time – strange, we are becoming largely nocturnal, but are also up during the day…
Since the early days of WWRG group members have headed out across the world to help on wader projects elsewhere. This year is no exception and this month group members are part of a team working in Jiangsu on the Yellow Sea in China. The team, working with Nanjing Normal University, is aiming to catch and mark Spoon-billed Sandpipers (SBS) to find out more about where this endangered and charismatic species goes, as well as being able to work out population size. We are also aiming to catch a range of other shorebird species, both to assist local studies and to help train other members of the team.
Tuesday 29 May was a hard day at the office! Off into Mispillion Harbor bright and early again to get another Red Knot sample (and hopefully others too), in the knowledge that thousands of birds went out of Mispillion last night. The late boat crew the previous night had an amazing time with noisy flocks ‘discussing’ migration before heading off high to the north – great to see them go, but sad for us as the season is drawing to a close. There were still thousands of birds left in the Harbor so we set on Back Beach, but the birds didn’t want to play, although we got very close to taking a catch. Plan A, Plan B and Plan C (two moves of the set net) failed to quite get us enough target species (and included too many others), although we did get very close to firing. As the tide dropped off, we gave up after four hours of tension. Back to the houses for lunch, leaving a team of resighters on the beach. Then a try for Sanderling on Prime Hook Beach – this time to the south, again we came very close, but didn’t catch.
As we only had two Turnstone in the catch on 24 May, we went for a small catch on 25 May on Prime Hook Beach, hoping to repeat the 22 May catch. We found Turnstone in the same place, but they were moving around a lot so we only managed a very small catch. Others spent the day out resighting and surveying.
