brewood ringers

I and a gang of mates from our ringing group and the Mercian group spent our annual rining week on Lundy Island during the last week of April. Unfortunately the weather was useless for ringing--east/north east all week with clear skies--and no migrants. consequently we spent all week with lots of nets, lots of ringers and caught just over 100 migrant passerines; this was our worst catch in 31 years of visits. For the first time ever, we caught more Manx Shearwaters than Willow Warblers. Let's hope the weather conditions will be better for our October trip and next April--news of them in due course.

I was then very fortunate to be invited by the Finnmark tourist board to visit the very northern tip of Norway to assess the potential of the place for ecotourism. It was a fascinating trip to a place I had dreamed of visiting for many years--too much to report here, but we had some brilliant sightings of brown bear, orcas, reindeer, sea eagles by the ton, gyrfalcon, hawk owl, arctic redpoll, breeding brambling, redwing and fieldfare, brunnich's guillemot, stellers eider, king eider and 'blue' fulmars-to name but a few.

An added bonus was an invitation to help them establish a ringing site in the area as an educational/tourist attraction. Any developments on this will find their way onto the blog in due course.