From Russia with love

3/09/17

Today dawned very cold, with the temperature gauge reading below zero and fog carpeting the valley. With the sun shining through, this quickly burned off, leaving an almost cloudless, and warm day within the pasvik forests. Our drive to Nyrud proved eventful, when 2 Elk crossed the road in front of us, giving great views of this young male and female duo.

Again, we concentrated on our main site at Nyrud, which proved to be more busy than on the last few days, with lots of birds vis-migging south and lots of calling birds within the surrounding woodland. This translated to a much better mornings ringing, with 51 birds processed. This is a significant increase on the last couple of days, and shows how variable the level of migration is on a day to day level.

Among the catch were a good array of species, with both Willow Warbler and Bluethroat being well represented, however the former made up more than half of the total catch. Also increased on previous days was the number of Reed Buntings, which may indicate the start of some passage of the species. Together with sightings of Rustic/ Little Buntings and Lapland Bunting today, hopefully we will be able to increase the variety in the coming days.

The main find of the day happened to be the very last bird of the morning as we were closing nets, when a Willow Warbler wearing a Russian ring was found! With increase co-operation between the 3 ringing schemes within the Pasvik trilateral park, we hope we may be able to hear where this bird came from when some of the group meet at their site in Russia later this week.

Remarkably, the 5^th Three-toed Woodpecker of the trip was found early in the morning, meaning that every member of the group has now had the opportunity to process and study this species in the hand.

Species	Totals
Willow Warbler	29 + 1 foreign control
Reed Bunting	9
Bluethroat	5
Meadow Pipit	4
White Wagtail	2
Three-toed Woodpecker	1
	50+1

We opened our feeder net at Ovre-Pasvik camping again briefly , resulting in a modest catch of Greenfinch. However, after a scouting effort the previous evening, plans were made to try to ring at a site adjacent to the camp. Plans were put into action and resulted in a good catch of Bluethroat, using the long grassland/ willowherb scrub habitats on the edge of the river. We look forward to exploring the potential of this site in the coming days.

Species	Totals
Bluethroat	6
Greenfinch	4
Reed Bunting	2
Great Tit	2
	14