1st February-2nd Feb Leaving Nsoatre

Vicky writes:

Over the last couple of days Bee, Ian and I have been gearing up for the last couple of days we shall spend based in Nsoatre as we will be driving to Pepease to work with Chris Orsman at the Wood warbler site. A team of ringers will be coming to carry on the work in a few days after we leave. We have been busy packing, and catalogued the field samples we had collected of the Palearctic migrants that will be analysed later in the lab. We also came to the rescue of a chick at the hostel that had decided to belly flop into a pan of oily red tomato sauce waiting to be washed up outside. A lather with soap, and some wet wipes later newly dubbed “tomato” was back with mum and his brood mates, disaster averted, and all in a days work for a fieldworker.

The 2nd was our last day of ringing at Nsoatre before heading off to Pepease, and we wanted to catch another Nightingale to fulfil the objective of 10 birds which would provide a good sample size. On the transect Nightingale “17” had been rather isolated, being a good few hundred metres away from the nearest “11”, so we targeted this patch to close this gap. As if sensing our impending departure the first bird caught was nightingale number “19”, and after the subsequent net rounds, the last bird we caught was also a nightingale “20” a perfect result! The next team will have their hands full tracking the 12 birds, which will take around 2.5-3hours to track, twice a day. It will be fascinating to see how these birds will behave over the next few weeks of the project, and as the tags last approx 18 days there will be a good data set.