Latest update & first post of 2023
4th April, 2023 | News & updates
Dear visitor of this website,
it has become a nice tradition that at the beginning (in a very very broad sense) of the year, I will update the gallery and post a post about the latest update together with plans for the next year. Plans that are not always fully fulfilled. So, here’s another one!
Latest update to the gallery (i.e. update from yesterday) is partly birds I photographed already last year and did not managed to upload them in time. Among these birds is also one new species for the gallery – Little Stint (Calidris minuta). And it is a very delightful species indeed. Also, it is one of the quite a few waders I was able to trap and photograph last autumn. Conditions on a nearby pond were exceptionally good (relatively speaking, of course) so I was able to sample these wonderful birds quite frequently. I took not only photographs of such birds but also many other kinds of data and I hope I will be able to present them in some meaningful way at the end of the year.
The Little Stint photographed in the field after extraction from the mistnet. It was so ridiculously small I had to laugh. Of course I knew, some Calidris sandpipers are small, but seeing it in real life caught me unprepared. It was barely bigger than a warbler!
Speaking of data, I was and still am collecting data on White Wagtails (Motacilla alba) and European Bee-eaters (Merops apiaster) so these two species are still not being regularly updated in the gallery as I plan to use their photos and data in some scientific papers. Because one of the reasons I do all this, the gallery and ringing in general, is scientific research. When these papers will be published, I will update these species again.
This small corridor in a very narrow reedbed, does not look like much, but it has become my main field site for trapping autumn wagtails. It produce just about the right number of birds per evening. Not too few so one can collect good amount of data and too many so one does not feel under pressure and does not need to skip some measurements (i.e. the data collection).
Most of the latest update are, however, birds I already photographed this year. I still plan to collect more photos also this year (actually, I already took pictures of about 100 individuals), but similarly to last year, I will mostly focus on my target species (Sylvia warlbers, wagtails, bee-eaters, Muscicapids) as well as any undersampled species.
Last year I was promising a filtering option for the gallery, but that did not happen, unfortunately. Let’s hope, it will happen this year, because for some species, the gallery has become really chaotic and hard to navigate.
So, the plans are set and we are ready to go into another field season. Spring is coming quickly to the Czech republic and I guess it will be again very hectic. But I promise, I will make some occasional updates to the website also during the field season. In the meantime…
Stay tuned!
And thank you for visiting.