Showing posts with label Cuckoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuckoo. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Cuckoo

And now for the worst TV advert of 2020. 

Why is this woman talking about Cuckoos from her childhood when the bird song in the advert is a Chiffchaff that sounds nothing like a Cuckoo?

Come on Nationwide, don’t take us all for mugs. At least dub the sound of a Cuckoo over the film and tell us about your savings accounts instead of virtue signalling about coronavirus.
    
Nationwide Building Society is a mutual building society, also known as a ‘mutual’. Put simply it means the society is owned and run for the benefit of their members.

Their Chief Executive Joe Garner was paid a total of £2.37 million in 2019 and he would like you to put your hard earned cash into a Nationwide ISA account that pays out the magnificent sum of 0.5% interest. That’s right, put £100 into their fixed one year ISA and you will receive a whole 50p in interest.
   
Now that is cuckoo.

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Home Birding

An extract from an email all ringers received this week.

“BTO SURVEYS IN THE WIDER COUNTRYSIDE”. 

“Following the Government statement on 23 March, our Senior Leadership Team has reviewed the BTO advice and is asking all volunteers to follow the guidelines presented by the Prime Minister. While the monitoring work undertaken by volunteers is extremely important, it must not compromise public health. 

To avoid this potential risk, we are requesting that all BTO surveyors, including ringers and nest recorders, refrain from undertaking survey work at sites to which they would need to travel by any means until this guidance is reviewed.” 

“All the best and stay safe”. 

Dave Leech, Head of Ringing & Nest Recording 
James Pearce-Higgins, Director of Science” 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's my contribution to "Home Birding", the newest buzz phrase for locked down birders with a post first published on Another Bird Blog on 31/12/2011 - New Year’s Eve 2011. Click the pictures for a close-up.

It’s time for recalling the past year’s highlights of birding, ringing and photography. Now is the moment when we choose to forget the low points, the empty pages in a sodden notebook, netting a handful of birds on a seemingly perfect spring morning, or discovering that you set the aperture wrong.

Here we go in rough chronological order with a selection of photos and personal highlights of 2011.

In the early part of the year we holidayed in Egypt at a time when the country was undergoing a revolution, but the confiding birds hadn’t joined in the turmoil and just behaved naturally for a visiting Brit.

Egypt proved to be a wonderful place for bird photography and so difficult to select just a few pictures, apart from the Kingfisher which is just about my favourite photo of the year, taken with a decent choice of aperture for once.

Kingfisher - Egypt

Cattle Egret - Egypt

I’d left Will counting Siskins building up by the hundreds in his garden, together with a dozen or two Brambling and Lesser Redpoll. Within days of returning from Egypt I joined him for some memorable ringing sessions and notable breakfasts.

Brambling

Lesser Redpoll 

Siskin 

Bacon Butty 

Spring and autumn were great for catching and photographing Northern Wheatears at Pilling. With the help of sacrificial meal worms I caught fourteen “Wheats” and clicked the shutter button a couple of hundred times on the beautiful chat, passing Meadow Pipits or the occasional Linnet.

Wheatear

Meadow Pipit

Linnet 

The annual ritual came along, May in Menorca, the island where birds are hard to find but fortunately more numerous than birders. This year a ringed Audouin’s Gull at the hotel pool gave me an excuse to search for that extreme rarity, a Menorcan ringer.

A Ringed Audouin’s Gull -

A Ringed Audouin's Gull

Summer was warm and wonderful, ringing Swallow chicks, finding Skylark nests and stumbling upon young Lapwings or breeding Redshank.

Skylark

Barn Swallow 

Redshank

Lapwing

Then at the end of summer came a chance to take photographs of a species rapidly becoming a rarity, the unfortunately named “Common” Cuckoo.

Cuckoo 

Autumn and early winter was given over to ringing pipits, buntings, finches and thrushes “on the moss”, the satisfaction of working a regular patch with a job well done.

Reed Bunting 

Tree Pipit

Yellowhammer

Don't forget to Spring forward tonight by changing all those clocks. Or not.




Back soon with Another Bird Blog.  Linking this post to Anni's Birding in Texas.

Friday, July 20, 2018

A Cure For Ornithophobia

I’ll bet we have all met people who don’t appreciate birds. You know the type. Just as you’re enjoying a quiet spot of birding, relishing the grace and beauty of a Spotted Flycatcher or watching a Peregrine beating up the waders, along comes Mr Dickhead, all mouth and an over-abundance of non-functioning brain cells. He’s hoping to wind-up a nerdy birder. Although he’s never met a birder he knows they are all nerdy 'cos his mate in the pub told him. 

Spotted Flycatcher

"Spotted anything interesting pal? What f...ing use are birds anyway? I can’t sleep at night because of bloody seagulls on my roof from dawn until dusk. And they shit too much. That is when they are not rooting through my bin bags and scattering KFC boxes all over.” 

“And those sodding pigeons, rats with wings I call them, clogging up the town centre and crapping everywhere. Same with those duck things in the park. My kids can’t eat their jam butties in peace without “Quack, quack, bloody quack. Give us our daily bread”. 

There’s not much point in trying to explain science to a moron, someone who’s never taken the trouble to think about birds’ role in the natural world; how birds maintain sustainable population levels of their prey and predator species and, after death, provide food for scavengers and decomposers. How birds are important in plant reproduction through their services as pollinators or seed dispersers and why birds are important members of many ecosystems. 

I suppose the poor chap could have a touch of Ornithophobia. Yes, there’s a name for a person's abnormal and irrational fear of birds, or someone with a dislike of birds because of their habits or reputation as pests e.g. Carrion Crows, Collared Doves, Jays, Starlings, Gulls, Magpies and pigeons (feral & Woodpigeon). 

In such cases, keep it simple. I mention that birds eat a lot of insects, bugs and creepy-crawlies, all the things that Mr D also hates, and that if birds didn't do that, the world would be knee deep in such things within the week. Such a mind-blowing, revolutionary idea is often enough to make their dimmed light flicker, at least for the time being.  Off he goes in search of more worldly knowledge and I go back to birding with a cheery under my breath “bugger off”. 

But, here’s proof. “Birds around the world eat 400 to 500 million metric tonnes of beetles, flies, ants, moths, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets and other anthropods per year.”

Cuckoo

It’s from Science Daily, 2018. The numbers have been calculated in a study led by Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel in Switzerland. The research, published in Springer's journal The Science of Nature, highlights the important role birds play in keeping plant-eating insect populations under control. 

"Nyffeler and his colleagues based their figures on 103 studies that highlighted the volume of prey that insect-eating birds consume in seven of the world's major ecological communities known as biomes. According to their estimations, this amounts to between 400 and 500 million tonnes of insects per year but is most likely to be on the lower end of the range. Their calculations are supported by a large number of experimental studies conducted by many different research teams in a variety of habitats in different parts of the world. 

"The global population of insectivorous birds annually consumes as much energy as a megacity the size of New York. They get this energy by capturing billions of potentially harmful herbivorous insects and other arthropods," says Nyffeler. 

Bee Eater

Forest-dwelling birds consume around 75 per cent of the insects eaten in total by birds which make up about 300 million tonnes of insects per year. About 100 million tonnes are eaten by birds in savannah areas, grasslands and croplands, and those living in the deserts and Arctic tundra. Birds actively hunt insects especially during the breeding season, when they need protein-rich prey to feed to their nestlings. 


Swallows

Further, the researchers estimated that insectivorous birds together only have a biomass of about three million tonnes. Nyffeler says the comparatively low value for the global biomass of wild birds can be partially explained through their very low production efficiency. This means that respiration takes a lot of energy and only leaves about one to two percent to be converted into biomass. 

"The estimates presented in this paper emphasize the ecological and economic importance of insectivorous birds in suppressing potentially harmful insect pests on a global scale -- especially in forested areas," explains Nyffeler, who says that this is especially so for tropical, temperate and boreal forest ecosystems. 

"Only a few other predator groups such as spiders and entomophagous insects (including in particular predaceous ants) can keep up with the insectivorous birds in their capacity to suppress plant-eating insect populations on a global scale," he adds. 

Hoopoe

A study from 2017 which Nyffeler also led showed that spiders consume between 400 and 800 million tonnes of insects each year. Other predator groups like bats, primates, shrews, hedgehogs, frogs, salamanders, and lizards seem to be valuable yet less effective natural enemies of plant-eating insects. He says their influence seems to be more biome-specific rather than on a worldwide scale. For instance, lizards help to suppress insects on tropical islands, but less so on a broader scale. 

"Birds are an endangered class of animals because they are heavily threatened by factors such as afforestation, intensification of agriculture, spread of systemic pesticides, predation by domestic cats, collisions with human-made structures, light pollution and climate change. If these global threats cannot soon be resolved, we must fear that the vital ecosystem services that birds provide -- such as the suppression of insect pests -- will be lost," says Nyffeler. 

Short-toed Lark

Maybe all birders should carry a paper copy of the above? It would come in handy when we next meet up with Mr Butthole; although the chances are he can’t read. 

Linking this post to Anni's Birding Blog.


Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Over And Out

This blog stays well clear of party politics apart from occasionally noting that politicians know or care little about the environment or birds in general, but will answer a question or give an opinion with clichés or words they think a questioner wants to hear. There are no votes in birds. 

The referendum of 23rd June is slightly different by giving ordinary people a chance to decide whether the UK should either leave or stay in the European Union. There is a clear choice based not along traditional party lines of left, right or centre, but on how people feel about being part of the EU. No one should feel obliged to vote how their usual party allegiance tells them. 

Supposedly there are 500 bird species protected by the EU Wild Birds Directive, but it has achieved little or nothing for once common birds like the Cuckoo, the Curlew, the Lapwing, the Turtle Dove, the Skylark, the Yellowhammer, the Corn Bunting or the Yellow Wagtail. They are all in serious decline as seen in my own local area during the past 30+ years. A vast amount of public money has been wasted, misspent or worse, in thousands of funded agri-environment schemes that are not adequately checked or controlled with the result that most of the schemes produce no meaningful increases in our UK wildlife. 

Turtle Dove - declined 88% since 1995 

Common Cuckoo- declined +49%

 Lapwing - declined +55%

Yellow Wagtail - declined +43%

Corn Bunting - declined +50%

In the European Union there are theoretical constraints on the killing of migratory birds but hunting continues unabated as the EU shows itself unwilling or unable to stop the slaughter. The situation in the Mediterranean is appalling. Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, or general amusement. The killing is indiscriminate with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterranean hunters shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion Euro conservation projects. 

All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes. The French continue to eat Ortolan Buntings illegally, and France’s long list of “quarry” birds includes many struggling species of shorebirds. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain where migratory thrushes are a particular target. Maltese hunters blast migrating raptors out of the sky. Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them in platefuls of “ambelopoulia” (trapped birds) at €50/€60 a time in law-breaking restaurants. 

One of the most damaging implications of Britain joining the EU has been the effect on our fishing industry by the UK giving up its territorial waters and protected fishing areas to the EU. The results of this disastrous policy have been witnessed just a few miles down the road from here at Fleetwood, a once thriving fishing port. As with most policies emanating from the centralised elite in Brussels, the Common Fisheries Policy was a major disaster. After its introduction in 1970, the CFP has been synonymous with decline of our fish stocks, deterioration of the environment, wasteful discarding of fish and the destruction of Britain’s fishing industry and communities. 

I worry about the unfettered freedom of movement across Europe, mainly the movement of both legal and illegal migrants, an ongoing disaster played out on our television screens on an almost daily basis. The population of the UK has risen relentlessly until it is close to 60 million due to immigration and the inevitable baby boom. The British countryside can never ever recover from the trashing now taking place to cater for the ever growing population of this tiny island. Each day I pass more and more green fields consumed by yet more houses and roads as hedgerows and trees are destroyed to heap yet more pressure onto our beleaguered birds. 

Staying in or leaving Europe should depend on other issues. Perhaps even the notion of democracy? Britain has little or no say in decisions reached by the other 27 member states or the unelected EU Commissioners who have too much clout in deciding how the EU is run. I don’t fancy living in a huge socialist experiment called The United States of Europe. That is the next stage of the EU plan - to swallow the UK and others into an amorphous mass that can be controlled more easily by an unelected elite without due democratic process. 

Meanwhile youth unemployment in Southern Europe continues near 50%, Greek debt soars to $350 billion and other countries line up to demand a vote on leaving the failing EU.

I know the argument – better to stay and use our influence to change the EU for the better. Unfortunately, and just like the Titanic, the dying EU is heading for the rocks where it and all aboard will sink without trace. It’s time for Britain, the fifth richest nation in the world, to jump into a lifeboat and sail to calmer waters. 

The historic and important decision for each and every UK resident is one I took weeks ago by putting an “X” in the box marked “LEAVE” of my postal ballot. Yes, I have already voted in the EU Referendum. I want OUT.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Shrikey!

For today’s post there are a few pictures of shrikes I saw in Greece recently. 

The shrikes were clearly migrants as I found them using a large area of scrubby ground just yards behind the busy sunbathing beach of Aselinos in the north of Skiathos. On this particular morning there were good numbers of Whinchats and Yellow Wagtails plus 3 Richard’s Pipits and a dozen or more Red-rumped Swallows. 

Not far away in a patch of olive grove I found migrant Spotted Flycatchers, Willow Warblers, a (Eastern) Bonelli’s Warbler and a Common Cuckoo. 

Cuckoo

Birding was quite difficult in Skiathos, not helped by the dawn to dusk bright sunshine and high temperatures in the mid to high eighties for the whole two weeks there. It meant that small passerines stayed deep in shady cover and hirundines remained high in the sky most of the time. In all I clocked up a lowly 35 species in the quite casual birding undertaken in what remained after all a holiday and a wedding celebration, not a pure birding holiday. Like many other Mediterranean destinations, birds are hard to approach. 

From Wiki - “The Red-backed Shrike Lanius collurio is a carnivorous passerine bird and member of the shrike family Laniidae. Like other shrikes it hunts from prominent perches, and impales corpses on thorns or barbed wire as a "larder." This practice has earned it the nickname of "butcher bird." I managed to get pictures of the shrike by using the car as a hide. 

Red-backed Shrike

“This bird breeds in most of Europe and western Asia and winters in tropical Africa. At one time a common migratory visitor to Great Britain, their numbers declined sharply during the 20th century. 

The bird's last UK stronghold was in Breckland but by 1988 just a single pair remained, successfully raising young at Santon Downham. The following year for the first time no nests were recorded in the UK. But since then sporadic breeding has taken place, mostly in Scotland and Wales. In September 2010 the RSPB announced that a pair had raised chicks at a secret location on Dartmoor where the bird last bred in 1970. In 2011, two pairs nested in the same locality, fledging seven young. In 2012 there was another breeding attempt, but no young were fledged this time, probably due to a prolonged spell of wet weather. This return to south western England has been an unexpected development and has raised speculation that a warming climate could assist the bird in re-colonising some of its traditional sites, if only in small numbers.” 

Red-backed Shrike

 Red-backed Shrike
 
There were at least 2 Woodchat Shrikes in the same area, one using much the same perches as the red-backed, and by using the same car-as-a-hide technique I was able to get some shots of this normally very wary species. 

Woodchat Shrike

Woodchat Shrike

Woodchat Shrike

Woodchat Shrike Lanius senator  breeds in southern Europe, the Middle East and northwest Africa, and winter in tropical Africa. They breeds in open cultivated country, preferably with orchard trees and some bare or sandy ground. Like other shrikes the Woodchat hunts from prominent perches, and impales corpses on thorns or barbed wire as a "larder". This species often overshoots its breeding range on spring migration, and is a rare, but annual visitor to Great Britain. 

I’ll leave blog readers with a few images of non-birding Greece. Don’t forget to ‘click the pics’ to join in the action. 

On The Bus Skiathos

Arriving - Skopelos

 Leaving - Skopelos

 Kebabs - Skiathos

No Name Gyros - Skiathos

More soon from Another Bird Blog UK. Be there or be square.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Instant Bird Art

65 mph winds today but not as bad as Scotland with a rumoured 100mph. I found myself fooling around with FotoSketcher, a free software program that converts photographs to artwork. Some of the results are below.

It’s worth a try if your skill with pen and ink or a brush is as bad as mine.

Swallow

FotoSketch Swallow

Wheatear

FotoSketch Wheatear

You can add a picture frame, alter the paper texture, or do black & white.

Cuckoo

FotoSketch Cuckoo

Kingfisher

FotoSketch Kingfisher


Looks like the wind may drop slightly tomorrow.
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