Tuesday 15/11/2011 No luck catching

Chris Orsman writes: Again this morning is foggy, and our start is delayed a little as although it’s post-dawn, things are still a touch dark. We open the same hill-top net, and Chris H stays in attendance as the playback is initiated. Meanwhile, the rest of us head down the hill to the successful spot from March 23rd earlier this year, and right amongst the encounters from yesterday. If it’s going to work, a single net will suffice, provided one or more birds respond to the recording. They should, in theory, head straight for the mp3 player placed beneath the middle of the net.
In almost 3 hours, we see two birds, and up at the top Chris sees one. At one point there was a faint wood warbler voice calling from the high canopy, but our two birds merely continued to happily forage high, and oblivious to the recording. A bit demoralising, but not entirely unexpected.
Considering our failure to catch, and even more so the lack of birds on the lowland site, we resolve to head back to the nightingales. The main concern is that I have not put a radio tag on a bird yet – a skill I need to master before I can do it without Chas and Chris, so our best chance, we feel, is to catch more Luscinias, and come back to the wood warblers in a few days when perhaps they will have arrived at our preferred study areas.