Friday 6 October – Sunday 8 October
With many of the usual team members away in faraway places, poorly or with car troubles, a small team collected at the fieldwork house with plans for a weekend of colour-ring resighting and the possibility of a mist netting session on Saturday evening. The likelihood of mist nesting was always doubtful due to an unsettled weather forecast. The forecast had deteriorated by mid-morning on Saturday and a decision was made that this would not go ahead.
Friday 22 September
The weekend began, somewhat unusually, with a mist nesting session on Terrington Marsh. This required a small number of people to arrive at the fieldwork house mid-afternoon to set the nets on the marsh ready for the evening catch. Two lines of nets were set, one on the E-pool and the second on the cannon-netting pool, with Ron and Nigel leading the respective teams.
The WWRG Spoonie team members are now on their way back from China. They sent two more updates before they left:
Guy examining a Spoonie.
8 October update: We were up again not long after midnight and out on the shore, setting mist nets as the tide ran off. We set two lines of nets and started to catch, largely Red-necked Stint but also a Spoonie and a Relict Gull. Over 70 birds were caught in total and lots of samples were taken for the Centre for Disease Control team. A small team headed back to the hotel to collect more people, breakfast and telescopes while the rest finished processing the birds and headed over to the lagoon, only to discover they had left one team member on the seawall!
The Spoonie team reports:
5 October updates: A day of resighting and recceing to find catching sites. We found little at the local site but 50 thousand small waders and probably another 20 thousand large waders at Taiozini, where we also saw four species of heron in one view, Black-eared Kite, Little Tern, White-winged Black Tern and Caspian Tern to name a few. More to the point, we had very good numbers of Spoonies to scan, although the wind made it very difficult to read any leg flags. Back to catching tomorrow, hopefully setting both cannon net and whoosh net.
