First survey in Mont Avic

The project starts with the catches: the aim is to put some radio-tags in order to study their movements through telemetry, to ring them, to obtain some biological samples (faeces, feathers and blood) and to have an overall view of their body conditions.

The first survey in Mont Avic Natural Park was realized near Ajassa stream, close by Dondena refuge, on the northern slope where there were just some patches of ground free from snow (as shown by the picture).

The area was still partially covered with snow

There were three of us since my colleague Enrico and I worked with the director of the park and we reached the point of survey around 10 am. As soon as we arrived we saw some Alpine Choughs flying over the area, landing and eating on snow (where we could find small diptera) and on the surrounding ground patches, therefore we decided to place some clap -nets and different nylon nooses, using raisins as bait, on a patch that we could easily monitor from distance. 

We placed the clap-nets at the interface between snow and bare ground

Then we got away and we observed them with binoculars: unfortunately they were just flying over "our" patch but they ate on other patches where we hadn't placed traps. 

We could see that they were exploiting especially small patches and we assume this is due to the presence of wet soil with higher abundance of invertebrates (compared to dry soil present in "our" patch since it was bigger and already dried in the middle part).

In conclusion we didn't  manage to catch them but we had some input to change a little bit the method that we used: next week, in Cervinia, we will try with different baits and a decoy (a "fake" Chough).

As concern avifauna in general, during the day we observed, among other Red-billed Choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), a bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), a young eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), several northern wheatears (Oenanthe oenanthe) and whinchats (Saxicola rubetra).