Timely Advice

Migrants are trickling north in ones and two without any signs of a major arrival to enliven a morning’s birding. Ringing is on hold while cold north westerlies predominate and this week I’ve been busy with half-term duties. 

I’m hoping to go birding Friday and/or Saturday, but in the meantime this week came timely reminders on the reporting of rare breeding birds from Mark Holling of the UK’s Rare Breeding Birds Panel and Mark Thomas of RSPB Investigations,  here.

They suggest a long list of species where news blackouts should apply in circumstances suggestive of breeding or potential breeding unless public viewing has been arranged:

Capercaillie 

Black-throated Diver 

Little Bittern 

Cattle Egret 

Great White Egret 

Purple Heron 

Eurasian Spoonbill 

Red-necked Grebe 

Slavonian Grebe 

Black-necked Grebe 

Honey Buzzard 

White-tailed Eagle 

Peregrine Falcon 

Montagu's Harrier 

Osprey 

Baillon's Crake 

Common Crane 

Black-winged Stilt 

Ruff 

Temminck's Stint 

Purple Sandpiper 

Green Sandpiper 

Wood Sandpiper 

Red-necked Phalarope 

Snowy Owl 

Long-eared Owl 

European Bee-eater 

Wryneck 

Lesser Spotted Woodpecker 

Golden Oriole 

Red-backed Shrike 

Penduline Tit 

Savi's Warbler

Marsh Warbler

Bluethroat 

Peregrine Falcon

Long-eared Owl

Lesser-spotted Woodpecker - Crossley ID Guide Britain & Ireland 

"By nature of their rarity, rare breeding birds are vulnerable to disturbance, but to do so deliberately is against the law. Although some species, particularly raptors, are still persecuted by game managers in some areas, there has been an increasing incidence of disturbance by birdwatchers and especially by bird photographers. Although such disturbance may be accidental, inconsiderate or careless behaviour can lead to birds deserting their nests or losing their eggs or young to predators.” 

The list includes species that are now beginning to make their mark in the UK as new colonisers but also one or two like Lesser-spotted Woodpecker, Long-eared Owl, Peregrine and even the once common Ruff, all subject to relentless chasing around pressure in this area should they appear either in or out of the breeding season. 

If only all bird watchers, including local ones, had taken note of the sensible advice and guidance above, we may have avoided the recent deliberate shooting dead of a Peregrine Falcon at St Anne’s-on-Sea, 15 miles from here and where the birds were subjected to almost daily visits and reportage on Internet social media.

Linking today to Eileen's Saturday Blog.

 

... They Keep Fallin......

Yes, it’s still raining but I’m not going to let that get me down because I have just spent an hour fixing the tethers of a mist net then set to on my pliers with WD40 in preparation for Sunday morning and the second coming of Fieldfares.

I’m still going through the old slides so here’s few to be going on with, the theme being “peckers and others” - and they give me the chance to have a rant where necessary.

Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers have never been common in this part of coastal Lancashire, in fact quite uncommon but turning to rare in the 1990’s, then becoming virtually non-existent in the new millennium. I think they last bred in the Fylde in the early 90’s but the picture below was taken in a wood near Salwick, Preston in 1982.



The last regular place to see lesser spots in the Fylde was perhaps Thurnham Hall where the ringing group used to do some work until that too was developed, this time for “leisure”. “Isn’t birding leisure?” I ask myself. What I really meant was the site was developed for someone to make money out of it, selling timeshare flats and opening up the grounds to a free for all. There’s no money in birding unless you are the RSPB, a mobile phone or pager company or import the latest optical must have.

Anyway the next picture was taken on Merseyside some years later when a fluke catch found both Great-spotted Woodpecker and Lesser-spotted Woodpecker in the same mist net. Note the aggression of the larger bird towards the Lesser-spotted Woodpecker.



My own ideas on the demise of the smaller species is that it is linked to the simultaneous rise over the same time span in the numbers of Great-spotted Woodpeckers where both species must compete to a great extent for suitable nesting sites, where the larger species is predatory and where the Lesser-spotted Woodpecker has historically always been on the edge of its range.

The next pictures show Northern Flicker which I likened in habits and looks some weeks ago to our UK Green Woodpecker when one showed up in Poulton le Fylde and which apparently became the subject of some frenzied twitching and listing. Obviously the first two pictures are mine, Long Point circa 1990, the third and superb one, is definitely not.







The next two pictures are fairly old digitised slides, one has clearly taken to the new format better than the other. The first is a Wryneck I found at Marton Mere many years ago one early August morning in 1986BMP (Before Mobiles and Pagers). At first it was easy to watch, I re-found the bird on a later visit where if I remember correctly, several people gathered round to watch it. By the third and forth day it became increasingly difficult to find as it roamed around the site, hiding amongst the old tip material, and some people never caught up with it.



Maybe the second picture from Scilly shows why a Wryneck can be so difficult to see or find unless served up on a plate.



Finally, someone asked me if I had any more pictures of the Pine Bunting because they want to go out and find one this weekend. I found one more picture, but good luck, you’ll need it if it continues raining like this.