Category: Fieldwork reports

Clive, Daphne, Mike and Steve, by Cathy Ryden

60 years young

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Members of the Cambridge Bird Club first started taking interest in the waders using The Wash in the early 1950s. Initially, this interest focused around monitoring and counting the wader populations in winter, but soon included catching attempts using mist nets and clap nets. The Wash Wader Ringing Group was formed during the summer of 1959 when a team, including Clive Minton, persuaded Peter Scott of the Wildfowl Trust to lend them their rocket nets to try catching large groups of waders on ploughed fields; the Group took their first rocket net catch, at Terrington in Norfolk, on 18 August 1959, exactly 60 years ago today. 

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Knot and semis, by Rob Robinson

Delaware news – the final instalment

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So the season is coming to an end, but we had plans to catch Knot on Back Beach to check if they had reached departure weights. We got the net set quickly near the camera and were able to view it from a boat to check safety and further up the beach to check numbers. We counted the Knot in and when we had a sample (50 birds), made a dry catch with samples of Knot (47), Turnstone (93) and Semis (43). As we thought, the birds were heavy (the Sanderling are almost spherical and waddling now), with some Knot well over 200 g, so we extracted and processed quickly before spending the evening watching migration from the Dupont Nature Center (DNC) – it’s certainly underway.

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Beach full of Turnstones, by Cathy Ryden

Delaware news – part 4

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Election day at home led to discussion in the Shorebird House as proxies had to be instructed. Then out to do resighting and surveys as we are in a new survey period, before showers and clean clothes to head up north (with a side trip to Bombay Hook in a thunderstorm for some) for our, now traditional, BBQ with Dave and Marg – a great time as usual, with food, drink, discussion and fireflies.

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Turnstone with flag 9=N, by Cathy Ryden

Delaware news – part 3

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So we still don’t have any Knot on this side of the Bay, but numbers are increasing in New Jersey. It seems that we maybe lost a lot of the Horseshoe Crab eggs with the nor’easter at the beginning of the season and the spawning hasn’t been good enough to fully replenish yet. The temperature is generally at a level that we can cope with, so not the normal highs over here. However, there clearly have been some Knot visiting us as we have recorded over 450 different individual Knot and seen some that have been marked in New Jersey this year.

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Horseshoe Crab, by Louise Clewley

Delaware news – part 2

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So the weather has improved on the whole, but we are still getting rain between being boiled alive in the humid atmosphere and eaten by bugs. We still have very few Knot on the Delaware side of the Bay, although we have heard there are over 10,000 on Reed’s Beach in New Jersey. The Horseshoe Crabs are spawning better now as it warms up so we are resighting Turnstone etc. and out looking for Knot appearing. Guy and Richard headed out to likely beaches to recce on Wednesday and Richard came up with an option at the bottom of Ted Harvey that would require two people watching the net – a plan was hatched to perch Richard on a hut and put Jacquie in a boat.

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