Dynamic Duo

The early bird definitely does catch the worm! In my case at least? An Early Saturday morning start down at Woolston had me meeting Kieran at 5.15 and erecting 3 nets on the edge of No.3 bed with the hope of maybe catching some Snipe.With the nets in place and dawn breaking we sat in the hide overlooking the area with anticipation, with nothing happening we had a wander to another fringe of the bed further round but drew a blank. On return there was fortunately a Common Snipe sat very nicely in the middle shelf and as we approached the net a Jack Snipe got up from under our feet, skimmed the bottom shelf pocket and fortunately snagged and flipped back into the net. Result. A top Snipe double. I had the fortune of extracting and processing the Common Snipe while Hugh got a very nice ringing tick with the Jack. Other than the promising start it was very slow going but thankfully all the coppicing is now finished, just one hell of a fire to have now.

Back out this morning with a ringing demonstration over at Norton Priory. Unfortunately the weather was not on our side with constant drizzle and the odd heavy shower. 11 nets were erected and a small selection of woodland species were processed. regardless of the weather turned out to be good experience and was good to meet up with David Norman, John Elliot and Alan Garner.