Category: Research

Photo of a Ringed Plover in the hand, by Chantal Macleod-Nolan

Fieldwork November 2021

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Friday 5 November

Most team members started to assemble at the base house from mid-afternoon (breaking the peace of Bernard and Carole who had been staying for a few days already). A mini-Glastonbury was then established outside to accommodate the large weekend team. Cathy, along with Lynne and Alex, provided a hearty meal of jacket potatoes with all the trimmings for the bulk of the team, followed by a fruit salad (Lynne), and a chocolate hazelnut tray bake (Alex) which was big enough to last the entire weekend (thanks to Tim and Ian B for washing up!). Katharine, Sophie, Alice, Rob, Sam and Skye all arrived later, with Rob blaming his later than planned arrival on the necessity to bake a carrot cake for the team, starting at 17:15…

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Mist netting at Wolferton, by Sam Franks

Fieldwork October 2021: Part 2 – the younger generation

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The following trip report was written by Sebastian Cooksey, age 14

BOOM! The cannons fired and the best weekend of my life had just started. After lying for around an hour in the grass, we suddenly rushed to our feet and were running to the catch. From first glance, we realised it was a wet catch, nonetheless we waded into the water and started the process of ushering the birds up onto the drier beach. Water flooded into my wellies, but the excitement overpowered the discomfort. When the birds were all up on the beach, nicely rolled into a pocket, we could calm down. I could appreciate what we had caught, lots of pearl-white Sanderlings mixed in with a few Ringed Plovers. We could now start the extracting process and I was going to just stand and watch the experienced ringers have the fun, but Rob encouraged me to go do some extracting and before long I had three Sanderlings in my hand ready to put in keeping boxes. I was really grateful that Rob encouraged me to get involved and I feel like all the other people I met on this trip were all just as welcoming and trusting. This is what made me enjoy this weekend so much.

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Photo of Sanderling on a shingle beach, taken at the birds' eye level. Photo by Cathy Ryden.

Fieldwork October 2021

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Plan for the weekend

This was always going to be a challenging weekend! We had a number of targets and hoped to achieve some of them. The weather forecast was for it to be mild, with light winds, but foggy nights and early mornings.

We had arranged for BBC AutumnWatch to come out and film our work but they could only make the Saturday morning. We had still failed to catch a single Curlew on our east shore study area and had ten GPS/GSM tags to deploy. This is the single largest expenditure on a project that the group had made (£12,000) in its 60-year history so we did not want to have to leave them in a box until next year. We then had an Oystercatcher tag that had already been on two Oystercatchers and had just been found on a beach after the silicone harness had broken (as they are meant to do).

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Snettisham Beach with moody sky, by Rob Robinson

Is climate change affecting Wash waders?

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As CoP26 (the 26th annual Conference of Parties signed up to the UN’s Convention on Climate Change) gets underway in Glasgow, all eyes are on the global response to climate changes and whether national governments can come together to reduce global Carbon emissions sufficiently to avert some of the frightening effects predicted of ‘Business as Usual’. With most world leaders and tens of thousands of delegates discussing everything from atmospheric physics to social justice, such gatherings can seem a world away from the tranquil vistas of The Wash. But already we are seeing the effects of climate change, and the data archives of the Group, as well as research by Wash Group members has been vital in documenting these.

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Wash wader research on Autumnwatch

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Normally when people hear what time we get up to set and man our nets they look rather bemused and think of their warm beds. So it was great to welcome a crew from Autumnwatch, who joined us in during our October 2021 fieldwork to find out about our research on waders using The Wash. The crew came out with us early on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning when our target was Sanderling, one of our 11 study species, which we were able to catch.

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