Spelthorne - Queen Mary's Resv - Ring A Ding Ding Yellow Browed Warbler!

I have been a member of the Hersham Ringing Group for just over a year now. Their operations are based at Queen Mary’s Reservoir in Spelthorne. There are a variety of habitats situated below the reservoir ranging from woodland, open scrub, mixed trees and scrub and areas of reed-bed. Tony Beasley is the co-ordinator of the group activities and can only been described as a machine when it comes to ringing and data processing. Since the COVID-19 outbreak the group has not met as one but days of the week have been divided up between the members allowing the reserve to be covered on most days.

I work under Tony s supervision which allows us to meet up every Tuesday for a ringing session. The training is on a one to one basis which has resulted in a steep rise in my ringing learning curve. We put up nets in the areas of the pylons which is mainly mixed scrub, trees and a small river that runs at the back of the net runs.

I do not usually post about ringing activities but have been given the green light to share an amazing day which yielded 62 birds, 11 species including a ringing rarity Yellow Browed Warbler (YEBWA) in the nets.

The YEBWA was a ringing tick for me and had us both beaming and chattering like school-kids about the wonders of the bird and being able to look at it closely in the hand. I was quite amazed that I remained perfectly calm processing the bird with the wing formula confirming the species from a “Hume’s”. This was the second bird in two years on site. The first I saw but was down the order to process it.

After the excitement of photographing and releasing this gem of a bird Tony’s plan B came to fruition with Lesser Redpoll falling into the nets on the pylon mound. The Redpoll was processed and released together maintaining the flock size!

The grin on Tony’s face was priceless. Mission accomplished!

Amongst the regular species an early Goldcrest was processed. This species will move through the site in numbers during October.

As a general rule the first three letters of the first common name and second two letters are used in the ringing species code.

The days tally including re-traps shown in (-):-

YEBWA 1 (0), BLACA 20 (2), LESRE 19 (0), CHIFF 11 (0), GOLDC 1 (0), GRETI 1 (2), BLUTI 3 (4), GOLDF 3 (0), DUNNO 2 (1), BLABI 1 (0), GRSWO 0 (1).