Bird Watching Lancashire

It appears to be an early spring with both Reed Warbler and Pied Flycatcher  for example arriving very early. Our ringing has shown some quick  movement in Lesser Redpolls. One ringed in a Cheshire garden on March 24th was caught at a feeder …

Today there was at least 2300 Godwits on the Eric Morecambe Complex on the edge  of Morecambe Bay. But with high spring tides most were on the flooded salt marsh. During the first half of March we have sighted  five colour ringed birds. …

Black-tailed Godwit have started arriving in reasonable numbers at Leighton Moss in recent days.  Several of these have long histories of spring sightings at Leighton and other very local sites having spent the winter further south on the Dee.&nbs…

We have continued our colour ringed study of Nuthatch visiting Jerry and Barbara’s woodland edge garden at Silverdale. They usually see no more than two birds visiting their feeders at once but since late summer 2018 we have seen or caught 19 birds. In…

 With almost all the data in for the year we have ringed  10750 new birds, although with retraps and sightings we have details of almost 14000 captures.Top of the pile as usual is Blue Tit with 2263 followed by Goldfinch at 1059 and Pied Flyc…

One of the many things that has come out of the Knot work at Formby is the vast amount of data being produced by a small team of dedicated observers which nearly 4,000 observations being made.  These are all really valuable and without your help m…

So far to date we have ringed 962 Goldfinch our best year ever. Its interesting to look back over the years and trace the increase of Goldfinch both as a breeding bird in our area and of course as a bird at feeding stations where most of our birds are…

Mark and Dave had a wonderful surprise  on the 2nd when the only  Brambling they caught  carried a Norwegian ring. The group has only ringed 375 over the years and our only other foreign recovery was from The Netherlands.They also had a …

Our best recent highlight was a Chiffchaff caught at Poole Harbour in Dorset just four days and two hours after ringing at Middleton NR,a movement of 370 km S. It weighed 9.4 gms when caught, a good weight for a Chiffchaff but only 8.1 grams when caugh…

In a spell of  windy days it was great to have a calm morning on Wednesday this week allowing a visit to the best site for catching Bearded Tits. We were not disappointed, for we caught this years record catch  of 14 of which 11 were new bird…