:: Wild Places Blog ::

Not a bad start to our ringing here in Uist, we did our first ringing on the 16th August and have been catching at two sites - our garden and the garden next door. The two gardens couldn’t be more different - Bill has been in his house 30 years and the vegetation is, for [...]

I’ve changed my name to Miss Whiplash this week and with very good reason. Are you thinking figure-hugging black leather trousers and top , thigh high stiletto boots, whip in hand at the ready?
No, the reason for the name change is more due to the injuries i think i must have sustained due to Ian’s [...]

As a ringer i always get a small thrill of excitement to find an envelope from the BTO in the post - you can recognise it immediately as “news about a ringed bird”. The one today was to tell me that one of the Greenfinches i had ringed in Shropshire in January had been re-captured [...]

Packed our ringing gear and headed up to Lincolnshire on Friday evening, arriving around 9pm. A couple of beers and a catch up with James then an early night in readiness for getting up before the crack of dawn.
17th April 2010
James has recently been developing another part of the site we had been to previously. [...]

Had news from the BTO that one of the Greenfinches i ringed in Shropshire back in January 2009 has been found dead in Daventry, Northamptonshire, where it had unfortunately flown into a window. Not the greatest distance covered by a GREFI but always interesting to know what has happened to the birds i’ve ringed.
View Greenfinch [...]

Just a few days in Shropshire as i wanted to see all the family before heading off to Greece on the 16th March.
Weather cold with frosty mornings - it will be so lovely to experience warmth, blue skies and sunshine - this winter seems to have gone on for so long!
Only ringed Monday am, Tuesday [...]

I must admit that when i got home from work last night and found our ringing gear in the front room i felt rather ambivalent about it - after a really busy week at work i’d spent all day telling everyone how i was looking forward to a long lie in.  Still, i can’t resist [...]

A chance to see the family and do a little ringing in and around mum and dad’s Shropshire garden. We were there from New Years Day until the 7th January and it was fairly cold. We didn’t have any snow until the evening of Tuesday 5th January - being soppy old tarts we let the [...]

A few days in Shropshire, catching up with the family and of course we had some nets up in and around the garden. the house next door is STILL derelict and no sign of anything being done with that. The local authority had very kindly strimmed the grass in the back garden and trimmed the [...]

Well, here i am back in the UK! Said goodbye to all those lovely North American birds - the two days before leaving Delta there were so many birds around, we could have caught literally hundreds and hundreds of sparrows and juncoes but had to pack up the nets and clear everything away for the [...]