Sally Hofmeyr rings at Intaka Island near Century City in Cape Town on a regular basis and today was such a day. It has rained for the past 3 days so I was somewhat sceptical that we would be able to ring at all but as it turned out, it cleared up enough for us to ring till about 11.30am. Intaka is quite far from where I live in Franschhoek so I only arrived after 8.30am and found Sally with 4 trainees busily extracting birds and ringing as fast as they could as they had run out of bags, there were that many birds! Luckily I have a lot of bags so could first help them to take birds out of the nets. The most abundant bird was biting weavers, as usual near water.
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| Full breeding plumage male Cape Weaver |
Amongst the many Cape and Southern Masked-Weavers we processed were a few Cape White-eyes, Karoo Prinia, Southern Red Bishop and Lesser Swamp Warblers.
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| Lesser Swamp Warbler |
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| Southern Red Bishop male looking really scruffy in his transition plumage |
The Bishops are looking so weird in their transition feathers. It is the very early stages of their breeding season and the males are busy acquiring their beautiful velvet red and black feathers. It was very interesting to find these tiny red pin feathers at the base of the tail.
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| Red pins coming through |
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| The Group: Sally Hofmeyr, Noel (USA), Yakat (Nigeria), 2 Canadian visitors and Sarah (the scribe) |
At the end of the day, Sally ringed a single female Fiscal Flycatcher which made a nice addition to the ringing total.
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| Female Fiscal Flycatcher |
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