Lapland 'Hunting'........

I was given the very privileged opportunity yesterday evening to try and catch some Lapland Buntings. In recent weeks there has been a huge influx of these winter visitors to many coastal areas of Britain, in some cases more than 10 times the usual number of birds!! The plan was to 'drag net' (a technique used by ringers to catch ground roosting birds) the fields where the birds had been seen in the daytime, in the hope that some of them were still there roosting. After about an hour of methodically walking up and down the field trying to cover as mush of it as we possibly could, we had successfully caught 3 Lapland Buntings and 7 Skylarks (another ground roosting bird). Adding to the other 4 Lapland Buntings that Tony Cross and Kelvin Jones had caught on another 2 trips, meant that a total of 7 Lapland Buntings had been trapped and ringed at this one site!! Amazing really, as only 17 of these birds have been ringed in Britain over the last 4 years!!