Auch, a Jay!

The past two weeks the weather has been great for seawatching...! But not for ringing birds! Abundance of rain and wind make it unpleasant to be out ringing birds. Still, I had a ringing session in my garden on last week's Monday resulting in 5 Blue Tits, 1 Chaffinch and 2 Greenfinches.

Greenfinch, 1cy female. This individual from last week shows the same pattern in the primaries as a 1cy female Greenfinch I ringed yesterday. 

You can see that P6,P7 and P8 have been moulted, but that the rest of the primaries have been retained. Note the difference in yellow of the shafts of P6-8 with the rest of the primaries. So the two Greenfinches I ringed lately both showed eccentric primary moult, which is interesting because it doesn't happen that often

Yesterday 12-12-11 I ringed the following:

Blue Tit 2 - 2

Greenfinch 1 -

House Sparrow 1 -

Jay 1 -

Total of 7 birds

The Jay was a long-awaited new species to be ringed in the garden. While I was watching the garden from my attic I saw it bump into the net! I ran downstairs as fast as I could and I succesfully extracted the bird from the net.The Jay was - as always with the cuties - very aggressive and made sounds as if I was slaughtering the bird. All the neighbourhood birds decided to check what was going on! I guessed all the birds wouldn't be coming back for a while after hearing and seeing what was going on, haha!

Adult Jay, based on the neat striping on the alula feathers, primary coverts and the greater coverts and by the fact that the outer GC has more than 8 stripes. In addition the bird showed squared like tailfeathers, which is a pointer for an adult bird too.

Auch!

Yesterday afternoon we also went to see a Red-crested Pochard on Bussloo, which was a county tick for me! Sunday we had difficulties with finding it, but yesterday we succeeded. What a beautiful duck! Furthermore, a hybrid Ferruginous Duck X Tufted Duck has been present there for a while.

 The male Red-crested Pochard with its brother, the Common Pochard (Photo by Tammo Meijer)

On the left a female Pochard, and on the right the hybrid Ferruginous Duck. Almost looks like a real Ferruginous... (Photo by Tammo Meijer)