House Martins leaving home

Everyone enjoys a sunny day but for the the Stapeley Grange team it provides a window of opportunity to release some of its wildlife back to the wild.  When releasing house martins we are ideally looking for fair weather for three or more days.

Following rehabilitation in the hospital our house martins are transferred to an outside aviary where they are given an opportunity to build up their flying skills and to acclimatise themselves to the various weather conditions that they will have to deal with when released.  Giving birds time to prepare for a return to the wild is very important especially for migrating birds that travel back to Africa for warmer weather. So before they left us we needed to catch them up to give them one final check over, to ensure they were fully fit for release.

To enable us to catch the birds we used a special mist net which is very similar to a volleyball net but virtually invisible so they fly into it.  It sounds easy but house martins are very clever and skilled flyers which is great in the wild but makes catching them up very tricky!

                        

Once each individual had been checked over they were placed into a container. Once we had caught all that were being released we took them to a suitable location onsite.  And then came the best part of the job; opening up and allowing them to fly off.  I knew they would be far too quick for me to take photos of them flying away so I filmed them instead.

Many of these birds were brought to us as orphans over the summer.  They had to be hand fed with meal worms every hour so it was a joy to see all that hard work and patience pay off, it was fantastic.

By Michelle Bite

Sponsors of Stapeley Grange Wildlife Centre and Cattery

  To donate to Stapeley text and our orphans: STAP70 £2 or £5 to 70070