Showing posts with label Snow Bunting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Snow Bunting. Show all posts

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Goldfinch Gone

Three days of sunshine and all the Goldfinches suddenly vanished from my garden. There's been 15-20 most of the winter so bang goes my plan to do a little garden ringing while in lockdown.

Goldfinch

So here's a post first published at the end of 2013 to celebrate the year's pictures in a month by month sequence. It’s mostly the birds which stirred the senses with odd shots of the places where memories are made. 

January is time to escape from the grey, cold skies of a UK winter and grab some welcome sunshine, if only for a few weeks. We were stunned by the long, wide, sandy expanse of the beaches of Fuerteventura, some several miles long and just begging to be walked. When tired of the walking I sat on some quiet rocks near the shore and took pictures of a Whimbrel, a shy wader species I had longed to photograph. 

Fuerteventura

Whimbrel

February continued where I left off in the early part of the year in ringing birds out on the frozen mossland. Brambling winters don’t happen too often, 2012 and 2013 being the first for several years and a winter when I caught 66 of the striking finches. One bore a Norwegian ring, another one later captured in Norway. 

Brambling

March, and as the ice lingered on there were still Bramblings to be seen along with a good number of common Reed Buntings. Bird ringing is not about catching rare or scarce birds. Catching and ringing birds is about monitoring the populations of common birds, an important and vital job in these worrying days of wholesale declines.

Many a trainee ringer has fallen by the wayside when realising that rare birds appear in mist nets on equally rare days and that the humdrum of catching common birds is mostly unexciting hard graft. Imagine my surprise on 15th March to find a Little Bunting in the net, an agreeable but unimportant addition to the winter catch of 72 Reed Buntings. That Little Bunting was still around into April when I guess it felt the urge to migrate.

Little Bunting

April is Wheatear Time. The migrant chats appear along the coast on their way to the uplands of the UK or Scandinavia. A few are destined for Iceland or even distant Greenland. The birds are hungry following their journey from further south and can rarely resist a mealworm, so I send them on their way north bearing a ring which tells others that they arrived there via the UK. 

Wheatear

May usually involves Menorca. The island draws us back with its rugged and gentle landscape, quiet roads, friendly locals and spring sunshine. Birds are hard to find but rewarding when you do, unimpeded by crowds of target birders running here, there and everywhere. The Hoopoes use the same nest site and feeding locations every year. Creatures of habit also use the same café for a spot of lunch. 

Hoopoe

Menorcan lunch

June and it’s time to find and ring some wader chicks. The task is to find them in the literal sense but also find them before they disappear as a species from our diminishing wetlands and intensified farms. Redshanks aren’t the easiest to come across, in fact they are damned difficult to locate, sprint like Usain Bolt and have protective parents that shame many a human. The first I ringed for a good few years. 

Redshank chick

July is a time when birds and birders go quiet. There nothing much to do except feed the kids and stay around the house, least of all travel very far to discover new things when migration time is far away. Skylarks aren’t the easiest of nests to find but I daren’t go near this one as the size of those grubs says the chicks are big and possibly out of the nest. Skylark chicks often leave the nest long before they can fly, an evolutionary adaptation which increases their chance of survival. 

Skylark

August often sits on the fence between summer and autumn not knowing which way to jump. The cold, late spring of 2013 made late broods last into August and wader chicks about to fly. My personal favourite picture of 2013 just happens to be my favourite species the Lapwing. With luck the spikiy young Lapwing below will live 15/20 years. Let’s hope there are places for it to live 20 years from now. 

Lapwing

September produced an unexpected holiday in Greece when our daughter Joanne married on the island of Skiathos. Two weeks of unbroken sunshine with a few birds thrown in. A battered old Suzuki Jimny served as a passable hide to photograph the normally unapproachable Woodchat Shrike and a superb vehicle to reach Kastro where we enjoyed numerous Eleanor’s Falcons. So many reasons to return in 2014 to the tranquil haven of Hotel Ostria owned by the delightful Mathinou family.

Skiathos, Greece

Makis and aubergines at Hotel Ostria

Woodchat Shrike

October was quiet with subdued migration on our west facing coast. Red-breasted Mergansers eluded me for years, shy birds unwilling to have a portrait taken until after a couple of days of rough weather I came across a young bird at Pilling. I got my picture on a grey, cloudy day but wonder what happened to the bird and if there will be another chance to photograph a merganser so close. 

Red-breasted Merganser

November turned up a few Snow Buntings, scarce in recent years. So infrequent have they become in recent years that any discovered immediately become target birds for those less inclined to actually find any birds for themselves. I had a Snow Bunting to myself for a while at Pilling and spent time lying spread-eagled on the tideline to take a few portraits as the bird fed unconcerned at my presence. 

Snow Bunting

December 2013 is ending as it began in a raging storm and more to come. In between the birding was hard slog with not much to show for time spent in the field. I searched my archives for December to find the best picture of a month’s efforts, a mediocre shot of an above average bird. Things can only get better in 2014. 

Curlew

As a footnote to the above. we won't get to Skiathos in May 2020 and maybe not in September.  The people of Skiathos suffered a financial blow in 2019 at the time of the Thomas Cook debacle - car hires, holiday lets, hotels, cafes, shops and restaurants, many of them small family businesses. Now those lovely people will be hit again as the island is already in lock-down. 

Linking today to Eileen's Saturday.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Pilling And A Pinkie

The morning began bright and breezy with gusts teetering on the edge of being “windy”, a subtle difference that birders will recognise whereby choosing a place to go birding requires a little forethought. Pilling was the decision and where after a three hour slog around the patch the old notebook had a good few entries. 

The flooded maize received a watery top-up last night although the soggy fields didn’t need it by virtue of the regular stuff there: 160 Redshank, 45 Lapwing, 28 Dunlin, 15 Skylark and 2 Little Egret. More than a few of the Lapwings and the Skylarks were in display mode. 

Two Buzzards came from over the Fluke Hall woods, circled around for a while and then headed off in the direction of Pilling village and the mosses beyond. The wood was a bit windswept for birdsong but I did see a pair of Stock Dove in the trees, 25+ Woodpigeon feeding on the ground and a handful of Goldfinch. 

Buzzard

Woodpigeon

Beyond the wood I checked out the fields to find 18 Pied Wagtail, 6 Oystercatcher, 15 Curlew, 4 Greenfinch, 4 Meadow Pipits, 1 Reed Bunting and a couple of dozen Pink-footed Geese. 

When the Meadow Pipits flew across to the beach I noticed their arrival and calling had pushed other birds into the air, and on checking I found the pipits chasing off 3 Snow Buntings. In the ensuing melee a flock of 40+ Twite lifted off the marsh then circled around to find a new spot on which to feed. The buntings seemed to head west along the sea wall and although I spent some time trying to relocate then I couldn’t, so I imagine they carried on towards Preesall, Knott End or Fleetwood. In the strong breeze blowing along the shore everything seemed very flighty and reluctant to stay in one spot for long. 

 Snow Bunting

Heading east I found more wagtails behind the sea wall, 5 Whooper Swans, 7 Little Egret, 5 Teal, 3 Red-legged Partridge and a couple of hundred scattered Pink-footed Geese. There don’t appear to be many pinkies around at the moment so maybe many have flown north towards Iceland already. 

Whooper Swans

It was last December 2013 near Pilling Water that I spotted a Pink-footed Goose wearing a neck-collar, the collar inscribed with the letters “TAB”. I reported the sighting online and yesterday received back the following information from The Wildfowl and Wetland Trust about when and where the pinkie was ringed and all the subsequent sightings. My own sighting at the bottom of the list is the most recent. 

There’s a clear pattern to the bird’s seasonal movements. After spending the summer months in Iceland the goose migrates south, probably stopping off in Scotland. It then spends part of the early winter in Lancashire or Norfolk, but seems to spends each New Year in Norfolk. By February, March and into April it is back in Scotland feeding up for its Spring flight to Iceland. There are an awful lot of flights to Iceland and back not included in the list below. Aren’t birds amazing? 

20/10/2006 Loch of Lintrathen ANGUS, Scotland - adult female Pink-footed Goose first caught then marked with “TAB”.
15/02/2007 Wester Dalziel, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
01/03/2007 Balnaglack, Dallcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
03/04/2007 Morayhill, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
18/11/2007 Breydon Water area, Great Yarmouth NORFOLK, England 
24/11/2007 Pollard Street, Bacton NORFOLK, England 
01/12/2007 N of Sharrington NORFOLK, England 
19/12/2007 Runham NORFOLK , England 
05/01/2008 Repps Mill NORFOLK, England 
16/01/2008 Repps Mill NORFOLK, England 
23/01/2008 Thrigby NORFOLK, England 
28/02/2008 Gellybanks area, Loch Leven PERTH & KINROSS, Scotland 
09/04/2008 Lower Cullernie, Balloch INVERNESS, Scotland 
02/11/2008 Fluke Hall Lane, Pilling LANCASHIRE, England 
08/11/2008 Bone Hill Fram, Pilling LANCASHIRE, England 
08/01/2009 Preesall Park, Preesall LANCASHIRE, England 
08/01/2009 Cockers Dyke, Pilling LANCASHIRE, England 
03/02/2009 Head Dyke Lane, Pilling LANCASHIRE, England 
02/03/2009 Wester Dalziel, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
07/03/2009 Cullernie INVERNESS, Scotland 
25/03/2009 Easter Dalziel, Dallcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
30/03/2009 Easter Dalziel, Dallcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
03/04/2009 Wester Dalziel, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
19/03/2010 Wester Dalziel, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
01/04/2010 Wester Dalziel, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
05/04/2010 Wester Dalziel, Dalcross INVERNESS, Scotland 
05/11/2010 Hall Farm, Rollesby NORFOLK, England 
01/12/2013 Dam Side, Pilling LANCASHIRE, England 

The bird below isn’t “TAB”, on 1st December 2013 she was far away, the inscription read via a telescope at 200 yards or more.  I’m sure however that the bird below is an equally amazing pinkie. 

Pink-footed Goose

More soon from Another Bird Blog. And remember, you read it here first.

Linking today to Eileen's Saturday Blog.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Was That a Year?

Now’s the time when many birding bloggers stuffed with turkey, bloated by booze or besieged with once-a -year visitors make excuses as to why there’s a lack of posts on their blog. I’m no exception to the general festive rule so my excuse is the identical to the above. Added to that we are now in the middle of yet more gales with both power cuts and 70 mph winds last night, so no prospect of birding just yet.

In pure self-indulgence I’m posting some personal highlights pictures of 2013 in a month by month sequence. It’s mostly the birds which stirred the senses with odd shots of the places where memories are made. 

January is time to escape from the grey, cold skies of a UK winter and grab some welcome sunshine, if only for a few weeks. We were stunned by the long, wide, sandy expanse of the beaches of Fuerteventura, some several miles long and just begging to be walked. When tired of the walking I sat on some quiet rocks near the shore and took pictures of a Whimbrel, a shy wader species I had longed to photograph. 

Fuerteventura

Whimbrel

February continued where I left off in the early part of the year in ringing birds out on the frozen mossland. Brambling winters don’t happen too often, 2012 and 2013 being the first for several years and a winter when I caught 66 of the striking finches. One bore a Norwegian ring, another one later captured in Norway. 

Brambling

March, and as the ice lingered on there were still Bramblings to be seen along with a good number of common Reed Buntings. Bird ringing is not about catching rare or scarce birds. Catching and ringing birds is about monitoring the populations of common birds, an important and vital job in these worrying days of wholesale declines. Many a trainee ringer has fallen by the wayside when realising that rare birds appear in mist nets on equally rare days and that the humdrum of catching common birds is mostly unexciting hard graft. Imagine my surprise on 15th March to find a Little Bunting in the net, an agreeable but unimportant addition to the winter catch of 72 Reed Buntings. 

Little Bunting

April is Wheatear Time. The migrant chats appear along the coast on their way to the uplands of the UK or Scandinavia. A few are destined for Iceland or even distant Greenland. The birds are hungry following their journey from further south and can rarely resist a mealworm, so I send them on their way north bearing a ring which tells others that they arrived there via the UK. 

Wheatear

May usually involves Menorca. The island draws us back with its rugged and gentle landscape, quiet roads, friendly locals and spring sunshine. Birds are hard to find but rewarding when you do, unimpeded by crowds of target birders running here, there and everywhere. The Hoopoes use the same nest site and feeding locations every year. Creatures of habit also use the same café for a spot of lunch. 

Hoopoe

Menorcan lunch

June and it’s time to find and ring some wader chicks. The task is to find them in the literal sense but also find them before they disappear as a species from our diminishing wetlands and intensified farms. Redshanks aren’t the easiest to come across, in fact they are damned difficult to locate, sprint like Usain Bolt and have protective parents that shame many a human. The first I ringed for a good few years. 

Redshank chick

July is a time when birds and birders go quiet. There nothing much to do except feed the kids and stay around the house, least of all travel very far to discover new things when migration time is far away. Skylarks aren’t the easiest of nests to find but I daren’t go near this one as the size of those grubs says the chicks are big and possibly out of the nest. Skylark chicks often leave the nest long before they can fly, an evolutionary adaptation which increases their chance of survival. 

Skylark

August often sits on the fence between summer and autumn not knowing which way to jump. The cold, late spring of 2013 made late broods last into August and wader chicks about to fly. My personal favourite picture of 2013 just happens to be my favourite species the Lapwing. With luck the spikiy young Lapwing below will live 15/20 years. Let’s hope there are places for it to live 20 years from now. 

Lapwing

September produced an unexpected holiday in Greece when our daughter Joanne married on the island of Skiathos. Two weeks of unbroken sunshine with a few birds thrown in. A battered old Suzuki Jimny served as a passable hide to photograph the normally unapproachable Woodchat Shrike and a superb vehicle to reach Kastro where we enjoyed numerous Eleanor’s Falcons. So many reasons to return in 2014 to the tranquil haven of Hotel Ostria owned by the delightful Mathinou family.

Skiathos, Greece

Makis and aubergines at Hotel Ostria

Woodchat Shrike

October was quiet with subdued migration on our west facing coast. Red-breasted Mergansers eluded me for years, shy birds unwilling to have a portrait taken until after a couple of days of rough weather I came across a young bird at Pilling. I got my picture on a grey, cloudy day but wonder what happened to the bird and if there will be another chance to photograph a merganser so close. 

Red-breasted Merganser

November turned up a few Snow Buntings, scarce in recent years. So infrequent have they become in recent years that any discovered immediately become target birds for those less inclined to actually find any birds for themselves. I had a Snow Bunting to myself for a while at Pilling and spent time lying spread-eagled on the tideline to take a few portraits as the bird fed unconcerned at my presence. 

Snow Bunting

December 2013 is ending as it began in a raging storm and more to come. In between the birding was hard slog with not much to show for time spent in the field. I searched my archives for December to find the best picture of a month’s efforts, a mediocre shot of an above average bird. Things can only get better in 2014. 

Curlew

I wish followers, friends and occassional visitors to Another Bird Blog a Happy New Year. May all your birding days be filled with discovery and joy.

Linking today to Eileen's Saturday Blog , Camera Critters and Anni's Blog.

Friday, November 29, 2013

More Snobs, Belated Phalarope

I’d been stuck indoors on Thursday morning waiting for the heating engineer and then when he came, discussing our non-functioning radiators with him. When I eventually reached Pilling to indulge in a spot of birding the afternoon proved a frustrating one with a flyover of 2 Snow Buntings, belated news of a Grey Phalarope and then a finish soon after 3pm when the almost-December light failed me. 

I set off from Fluke heading east along the usual path where a number of Redshanks and Curlews flushed from the marsh and the several hundred Jackdaws, Carrion Crows and a single Raven took to the air at my coming. 

Suddenly a Peregrine appeared from “nowhere” and briefly chased a Redshank towards the wood before doing the usual disappearing act over Ridge Farm. There were 15 Whooper Swans on the marsh, the birds now less tolerant than when they first arrived from Iceland in October and more inclined to flee from would-be observers. By 3pm I’d counted 165 Whooper Swans as they came and went between the marsh, the stubble field and an inland spot not far away. I hear tell some were killed as they hit overhead power lines near Eagland Hill - what a terrible end for such a majestic creature of the air. 

Whooper Swans

Waders on the wet stubble amounted to 44 Black-tailed Godwit, 14 Redshank, 75+ Lapwings and 1 Snipe. Passerines just 2 Skylark and 2 Linnets until I glimpsed two brown jobs lift off from Hi-Fly’s spilled wheat track, the birds showing flashes of white. As they called and flew they instantly became 2 Snow Buntings and I followed them as they continued flying over the wood, heading south and into the near distance. 

After a number of consecutive years when Snow Buntings have been rather scarce 2013 has seen a turnaround with the arctic buntings seemingly at a number of local spots. The picture is of a Snow Bunting here at Pilling on November 10th a few weeks ago. 

Snow Bunting

I watched as good numbers of Pintail and Shelduck arrived at the wildfowlers pools for their free meal, roughly 40 Pintail and 60 Shelduck, but no wary Teal just now. 

Along the sea wall came a non-birding acquaintance of mine who can put an accurate name to many birds but perhaps not to less well known ones. He told of a day some weeks ago and a small grey and white wader feeding at the surface of a pool, not a Snipe or a Jack Snipe, but smaller. The bird was so close and untroubled by his being there that my pal walked within 6 feet of it then took a picture with his mobile phone; I knew he had seen a Grey Phalarope. His pal who had also seen the bird later found something similar on the Internet and reckoned the creature might be a Grey Phalarope. 

Grey Phalarope

As my acquaintance has previously seen a winter Bittern in almost the same spot I ensured that this time he has my mobile number for future reference. 

Just a few short hours but for finding and seeing birds there’s no substitute for getting out there and actually doing it is there?

Back home the garden has been quiet for weeks on end, enlivened by a visit from a Treecreeper, a couple of sightings of a male Sparrowhawk, and the reason for the hawk, several feeding Goldfinch.
 
Goldfinch

There’s more news soon, belated or not from Another Bird Blog.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Snow Good

Yes, it’s an awful pun but very good to catch up with that wanderer from close to the Arctic Circle, the elusive Snow Bunting. Still no northern thrushes, but all week there’s been Snow Buntings dotted around the UK, even a flock of more than 30 on the North East coast. 

Last week’s high tides left lots of tide wrack, an environment which Snow Buntings often exploit, and I’ve been half hoping to see the whitish buntings along local shores. It was the early morning walk at Pilling which turned up trumps when I recognised the clear “tew” calls and watched a party of eight arrive high from across Morecambe Bay to then settle down on the tideline ahead. 

Within minutes a jogger had sent the birds into the air, calling as they went, me cursing as I watched the birds fly off. Luckily I found a single one further along the walk, possibly a returnee of the original party or a ninth bird. This one hunkered down from the westerly wind and buried itself in the tidal debris where it rapidly found lots of seeds. It ate so fast and continuously that I had to use ISO400 to stop the action. The tide wrack is very deep, the bird so submerged in it that I couldn’t get a single shot to show its shiny black legs, but viewers will get the overall picture. 

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting

It’s a number of years since I watched Snow Buntings at the top of the Cairngorms in Scotland, one of the species’ few UK breeding sites. For readers yet to see a summer Snow Bunting below is a photograph courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service which shows the species in its summery but snowy surroundings and wearing seasonal dress. 

Snow Bunting - courtesy of USFWS

After taking a number of shots I wished my Snow Bunting good luck, left it searching through the tideline and continued my walk west to Pilling Water. 

Kingfishers are the most frustrating bird, so tiny and inconspicuous, sitting silently on a featureless bit of the landscape where their fine-tuned eyesight can spot a human being from 100 yards to allow a quick escape. I was beaten again when one circled ahead of me at Broadfleet and then flew back in the direction I’d just travelled.

Sea Embankment - Pilling

Godwits were in force at the flooded stubble fields with 80 Black-tailed Godwits, plus 15 Redshank, 200+ Lapwing, 60+ Skylark, 1 Golden Plover, 6 Snipe, 2 Linnets, 3 Greenfinch and 8 Meadow Pipits. 

Meadow Pipit

Mute Swan

Out on the marsh, 35 Whooper Swan, 6 Mute Swan, 6 Little Egret, 1 Grey Heron, 2 Raven. Raptors seen: a pair of Kestrels together and a Sparrowhawk mobbed by the usual crows. 

That’s all for now but don’t forget that it’s not too late to enter the free draw for a signed copy of The Crossley ID Guide: Britain and Ireland here on Another Bird Blog via Wednesday's posting.

Linking today to Stewart's Bird Gallery .

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