Song Thrush with nesting material, by Edmund Fellowes / BTO
Nest recording | FIELDWORK
Song Thrush nests were among those found by the Group in its first nest-recording season.
Building a nest-recording community Nest recording is an immensely rewarding pastime. It is thrilling to discover and monitor a nest, knowing that your data are contributing to our understanding of breeding success. It can, at times, be a lonely experience though, especially when starting out and struggling to find nests. Here, Wayne Morris and Daniel Jenkins-Jones outline the joys of coming together with like-minded folk, and discovering the benefits of working within a nest-recording group. Both keen birders and involved in a number of BTO surveys, like many of our age, we had done some nesting in our youth, but we thought that the Nest Record Scheme (NRS) did not have the profile that some other surveys have and we wanted to find out more. Each year, BTO offers a number of nest recording training weekends, where participants learn nest finding techniques along with monitoring nests safely using guidelines found in the NRS Code of Conduct. We attended a course in Thetford, and learned how to cold-search for Linnets in gorse and how off-nest calls and the behaviour of Willow Warblers and Chiffchaffs lead to their nests. We found delicate Blackcap nests beneath ivy leaves, Jackdaws in tree cavities, beautifully built Long-tailed Tit nests in a variety of vegetation, Whitethroat nests, a Woodlark nest (under licence) located by triangulation and walkie-talkies, and many more. Finding nests of our own was a highlight, but we enjoyed chatting with like-minded people all interested in learning new skills and in discovering more about the secret lives of our common birds.
Winter 2020
ON OUR OWN
Back home and keen to put our newlylearned skills into practice, a few local sites were identified and with the Field Guide to Monitoring Nests at hand, we soon found nests of our own, including Blackbird, Song Thrush, Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler, Wood Warbler and Robin. It wasn’t all plain sailing however, and we certainly had our share of barren days, with Stonechats and Meadow Pipits in particular evading us. It was all too easy to attempt to cover too much ground and too many species at once. That was a lesson learned the hard way. IMPORTANT INDIVIDUALS
With another full season completed, and keen to understand what other nest recorders were up to in our county and how active they were, BTO kindly shared some local NRS data for our county of Glamorgan. We were immediately struck by how few recorders were active and the number of seemingly common and priority species that were either not, or infrequently, recorded. In Glamorgan, NRS is clearly dependent upon a relatively small band of very dedicated individuals, and we are sure
REFERENCES Ferguson-Lees J., Castell, R. and Leech D. (2011). A Field Guide to Monitoring Nests. BTO, Thetford.
LIFECYCLE – 25
