Blood moon

Up and out early at Grenen this morning. We caught a reasonable number of birds, 22 new birds and 3 recaptures. We also managed to clear some net lanes and paths and erect two new nets, so quite a successful morning! We managed to catch 3 redpolls together one of which had a yellow instead of red forehead, quite oddly. This seems to be xanthochromism, where the red pigment is either reduced or missing entirely and is replaced by the yellow pigment. An interesting bird!

The rest of the day we take quite easy as we intend try and catch terns in the evening and also watch the blood moon. I make us a cauliflower cheese for dinner, nice to experiment with new recipes. At 9pm Anders Bojesen and his wife arrive with a lemon ‘blood’ moon cake and we spend a couple of hours waiting for the moon to rise, which it does eventually and we watch the whole eclipse through. Sadly the wind picks right up during this and we have to call off the tern netting, still there’s a few more weeks left to try.

Ringed birds.         Recaptures
Blackbirds – 1.       Redpoll - 1
Reed warbler- 4.    Whitethroat - 1
Lesser redpoll – 2.  Crested tit - 1
Blue tit – 1
Lesser whitethroat – 2
Marsh warbler – 1
Whitethroat – 4
Great tit – 3
Blackcap – 1
Willow warbler – 1
Chiffchaff - 2

Xanthochromistic lesser redpoll

Blood moon