Had quite a few comments this past month from garden bird enthusiasts that there are many more Coal Tits around this autumn. Typical was today where one lady had seen six together on her feeders in a site some distance from woodland, she added that they were more numerous than Blue Tits.
This sent me scurrying to check out our ringing stats for this autumn. The best data was from one of our woodland feeding stations. So far this autumn we have had 124 handlings of Coal Tits this compares with only 32 in the same period last year although we have had one more visit this year during the period late September to early November. During the same period this year we had only 45 Blue tit handlings. So it looks like a good winter for Coal Tit numbers, Will be interesting to see what happens through the winter.
One of the Coal Tits caught this year had been ringed at the same site six years and 314 days previously. Certainly our record for a ringed Coal Tit. This autumn we have had two Blue Tits which were ringed as nestlings in the high altitude Oak woods in the Lune Valley as nestlings in our nest box schemes, caught in lowland areas, one at a garden feeding station the other in the Leighton Moss reed bed the later showed a movement of 16 km.
John
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