Monday 6 April 2020

C19, who'd have know?

As we are all currently confined to home territories outings have had to be postponed, cancelled, or put into abeyance. Our annual visit to Nan Ron, although still some weeks away, may actually be caught up in the tail end of the current situation - and we may not be able to visit this year.
I have had a look though all of our visits over the last years to find out when the latest visit in the year was made, and Stormies were still being caught. The answer was the 14th Sept, so I/we must live in hope.
While looking back through these years I started to play with some of the figures. Below is a graph which shows the annual totals, in blue, and the cumulative total in red. This relates to new birds caught only.
Since 1999 when we actually started to target Storm Petrels we have rung, on average, c1600 birds per annum. The best years to date have been 1999, 2004 and 2005 when over 2400 new birds were ringed. Last year, 2019, we rang 2358; but we should bear in mind that we now not only ring but collect full biometrics on most birds and, where informative, we photograph as well.

To date we have rung 34,246 birds.