Another Bird Blog: Menorca birds

Showing posts with label Menorca birds. Show all posts

Monday, May 21, 2018

Oop,oop,oop.

We saw lots of Hoopoes during our two week expedition to Menorca. Hang on, let me rephrase that a little. We heard many a Hoopoe; probably several dozen. We saw less - five or six individuals on a typical day.

"Click the pics" to see Hoopoe action.

Hoopoe

The Hoopoe’s “oop,oop,oop,oop” call carries many a mile over the quiet landscape of Menorca. But this mainly shy bird often calls from the cover of a copse, a dry stone wall or the corner of a distant building. For an apparently highly visible bird with a funky hairdo the Hoopoe can be difficult to spot. Its striking but basically sandy-brown plumage blends well with the dry landscape while the black & white wing pattern and the bird’s erratic butterfly flight allows the bird to dissolve into the dappled light of a Menorca day.

Hoopoe

The Hoopoe is very common in Menorca where it occupies a wide variety of habitats: vineyards, gardens, parks, woodland and agricultural situations. In fact anywhere that will hold a dark cavity in which they can raise a family.

The stink from a Hoopoe nest is legendary. The female secretes a substance of foul odour from the uropygial gland. This liquid smells like rotten meat. Due to the unpleasant smell, most predators stay away from the nest. On the other hand, insects, the Hoopoe's food, will be attracted but may find themselves to be the next Hoopoe meal.

I didn’t test out the smelly nest theory when I found a nesting pair during the first week of our holiday as it was a hands and knees job. The nest site was an inch or two from the ground with the danger of rubbing my nose into soil and debris from the unkempt surroundings.

Hoopoe

Initially I thought that the adults were feeding only tiny young as they carried quite small morsels of food into the lump of pre-cast concrete with a handy cavity. Mostly the adults took items through the hole and left quickly, but on occasions the slightly smaller female stayed in to brood the chick(s). One food item seemed to be favoured, a small, red spherical creature that appeared to be a spider or bug. On other occasions it was definitely spiders of one sort or another.

Hoopoe

May 18th was our flight home day. So on the late afternoon of the 17th I left Sue packing and drove for a last look and check of the Hoopoe’s nest. I was glad I did because after a while and soon after the female departed the nest, a younger head appeared at the hole.

The youngster peered out into the world it would soon inhabit. Passing cars, footsteps, sounds of laughter & joy from a nearby villa and swimming pool. The click of a camera from the window of a Fiat Panda didn't phase the youngster as it waited patiently for mum to return.

Hoopoe chick

Wow. That’s some gape; pure white, unmissable in the darkened depths of a nest when the adult arrives with a pile of grubs to share. Maybe there was only one youngster after all? We'll never know but my guess would be that the young Hoopoe was big enough to fly away on 18th May at much the same time as we flew back to Manchester Airport.

In the UK the Hoopoe is uncommon enough to be an attraction for twitchers. I guess it’s those jazzy looks, the wish to see that slow fanning in and out of the headdress or to hear that mellow “oop, oop, oop”?

Bird ringers will testify that in the hand the Hoopoe is something of a disappointment. Beneath that colourful finery lays a rather scrawny skeleton that seems in desperate need of a good meal. But I must admit a Hoopoe does make for a nice ringing “tick” and a good enough photograph.

Linking today to Anni's Blog and World Bird Wednesday.

Friday, May 11, 2018

Guess Where

Regular readers will know where Sue and I are this week. That’s right - Sunny Menorca, our annual treat after the British winter. The winter just gone was the worst for many a year so we are really ready for this respite.

First and foremost this is a holiday of rest & relaxation with a few birds thrown in for good measure. Sue tells me a holiday should not include blogging so I scheduled this post before we left to include pictures from recent years.

Apologies if some seem familiar but sit back at your PC, “click the pics” and enjoy some of that the Mediterranean sunshine as we take in a few birds and landscapes of glorious Menorca.

Menorcan Panda

Bee Eater

Donkey Love

Red-footed Falcon

Egyptian Vulture

Lobsters

Es Grau Nature Reserve

Sardinian Warbler

Hoopoe

Es Mignorn

Alaior

Hoopoe

Egyptian Vultures

View from El Toro, Menorca

Scop's Owl

Purple Heron

Tawny Pipit

Black-winged Stilt

Turtle Dove

Es Grau, Menorca

Hermann's Tortoise

Squacco Heron

Es Mercadal, Menorca

Bee Eater

Woodchat Shrike

Spotted Flycatcher

Fornells Village, Menorca

A hot day in Menorca

Back soon. Don't start birding without me.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

A Smelly Old Business

How do birds navigate over long distances? This complex question has been the subject of debate and controversy among scientists for decades, with Earth's magnetic field and the birds’ own sense of smell among the factors said to play a part.

It’s a subject discussed previously on Another Bird Blog but here's an interesting update by way of scientific experiments on an island I know very well.

In new investigations researchers closely followed the movements and behaviour of 32 Scopoli's Shearwaters Calonectris diomedea off the coast of Menorca.

Scopoli's Shearwaters breed across the Mediterranean on Menorca, Ibiza, Formentera, Cabrera, Conillera and Dragonera. The majority of the population of Scopoli's Shearwater spend the non-breeding season in the Atlantic, including areas off the west coast of Africa and east coast of Brazil. They return to the Mediterranean in spring where they breed on rocky coasts and offshore islands, often close to or alongside Balearic Shearwaters Puffinus mauretanicus. Hence, I see both species of shearwater when I visit Menorca in early May each year and when both are clearly visible from the shore, numbers varying with the daily weather conditions.

Scopoli's Shearwater - Daniele Occhiatto

Baearic Shearwater -Marcabrera [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Menorca

Now, researchers from the universities of Oxford, Barcelona and Pisa have shown in a new experiment that the sense of smell (olfaction) is almost certainly a key factor in long-distance oceanic navigation, eliminating previous misgivings about this hypothesis.

For the experiment the birds were split into three groups: one made temporarily anosmic (unable to smell) through nasal irrigation with zinc sulphate; another carrying small magnets; and a control group. Miniature GPS loggers were attached to the birds as they nested and incubated eggs in crevices and caves on the rocky Menorcan coast. But rather than being displaced, they were then tracked as they engaged in natural foraging trips.

Study leader Oliver Padget, a doctoral candidate in Oxford University's Department of Zoology, said: "Navigation over the ocean is probably the extreme challenge for birds, given the long distances covered, the changing environment, and the lack of stable landmarks. Previous experiments have focused on the physical displacement of birds, combined with some form of sensory manipulation such as magnetic or olfactory deprivation. Evidence from these experiments has suggested that removing a bird's sense of smell impairs homing, whereas disruption of the magnetic sense has yielded inconclusive results"

"However, critics have questioned whether birds would behave in the same way had they not been artificially displaced, as well as arguing that rather than affecting a bird's ability to navigate, sensory deprivation may in fact impair a related function, such as its motivation to return home or its ability to forage. Our new study eliminates these objections, meaning it will be very difficult in future to argue that olfaction is not involved in long-distance oceanic navigation in birds."

All birds went out on foraging trips as normal, gained weight through successful foraging, and returned to exchange incubation periods with their partners. Thus, removing a bird's sense of smell does not appear to impair either its motivation to return home or its ability to forage effectively. However, although the anosmic birds made successful trips to the Catalan coast and other distant foraging grounds, they showed significantly different orientation behaviour from the controls during the at-sea stage of their return journeys.

Scopoli's Shearwater - Martin Garner

Instead of being well-oriented towards home when they were out of sight of land, they embarked on curiously straight but poorly oriented flights across the ocean, as if following a compass bearing away from the foraging grounds without being able to update their position. Their orientation then improved when approaching land, suggesting that birds must consult an olfactory map when out of sight of land but are subsequently able to find home using familiar landscape features.

Senior author Tim Guilford said: "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that follows free-ranging foraging trips in sensorily manipulated birds. The displacement experiment has rightly been at the heart of bird navigation studies and has produced powerful findings on what birds are able to do in the absence of information collected on their outward journey. But by its nature, the displacement experiment cannot tell us what birds would do if they had the option of using outward-journey information, as they did in our study. This heralds a whole new era of work in which careful track analysis of free-ranging movements, with and without experimental interventions, can provide inferences about the underlying behavioural mechanisms of navigation. Precision on-board tracking technology and new analytical methods, too computationally heavy to have been possible in the past have made this feasible."

Story Source: University of Oxford. "Sense of smell is key factor in bird navigation, new study shows." Science Daily, 29 August 2017.

Linking today to Stewart's World Bird Wednesday.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

A Menorca Mishap

We had a great time in Menorca. Two weeks of unadulterated sunshine and not a drop of rain. We visited most of our favourite island places and saw lots of birds. Birding highlights proved to be thousands of Common Swift delayed from heading north by days of northerly winds. Mixed in with the common we saw a few Alpine Swifts, Swallows and Sand Martins. We had a morning of migrating Red-footed Falcons together with superb views of a female Montague’s Harrier.

There was a disaster when on day two I damaged my Canon 400mm lens to the extent that for the rest of the holiday I had to use a bog standard 35-135mm zoom – not good for taking bird pictures. Apologies then for the lack of bird pictures but please do enjoy the extra number of photographs of sunny Menorca. Don't forget to "click the pics" to enjoy the sunshine.

We saw Scop’s Owls every evening in the hotel grounds where they appeared as if by clockwork about 2130 to feed on moths and beetles. About 400 yards away another pair of Scop’s spent their daylight hours roosting in a pine tree after annoying the hotel guests with their monotone hooting throughout the night. This owl has reputation for being hard to see as it sits motionless against the trunk of a tree. On some days both owls were sat within inches of each other but on other days just a single one would sit unperturbed as people below struggled to give definition to the dark shapes above.

Hotel Sant Tomas

Sant Tomas, Menorca

Scop's Owl

On day one, May 1st, a few late Wheatears could be seen along the hotel frontage or in the grounds. The local Turtle Doves can get fairly tame, quite unlike their country cousins who live their lives away from tourists. As ever, Spotted Flycatchers can be found near tourist spots where a 135mm lens shows how the species is tiny.

Wheatear

Turtle Dove

Spotted Flycatcher

In the centre of the picture below is El Toro, at 342 metres, the highest point of the island. There are few birds up there except for Greenfinch, Goldfinch and the ubiquitous Sardinian Warbler and House Sparrow. The many viewpoints do give good views of the island common raptors, Red Kite, Booted Eagle, Egyptian Vulture and Kestrel. Naturally there’s a shop selling tourist goods but like most places in Menorca the parking is free and there is never a feeling that visitors to the island are simply cash cows.

At Torre del Daume

View from El Toro

El Toro

Ciutadella

Es Migjorn

Cookery demo - Es Migjorn

Menorcan centipede

It was on day two that I broke my lens. We had stopped at the Cattle Egret colony on the outskirts of Ciutadella and taken a few pictures before contusing on to Punta Nati and the specialities of Blue Rock thrush, Short-toed Lark, Thekla Lark and Corn Bunting.

Cattle Egret

Cattle Egrets

By early May the Menorca breeding season is well under way with most species either feeding young in or out of the nest. Upon crossing one rocky field I heard the warning “chip, chip” calls of adult Corn Buntings and within a few minutes found a young Corn Bunting hiding in the grass. Like many ground nesting birds, young Corn Buntings leave the nest before they can fly. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that lessens the chances of a nest full of youngsters falling victim to a predator whereby at least one or two young will survive to adulthood.

Corn Bunting

I tripped over a particularly well hidden rock and dropped my lens onto the stony ground. Today I’ll parcel it up and see if a lens doctor can make it better. If not, those floorboards will need to come up.

The road between Es Mercadal and Cap de Cavalleria proved the best for birding with regular Bee-eaters, Red Kite, Booted Eagle, Egyptian Vulture, Marsh Harrier, Stonechat, Sardinian Warbler, Cetti’s Warbler, Nightingale, Tawny Pipit and a mix of herons. We managed to see the regular species of Purple Heron, Grey Heron, Squacco Heron and Little Egret. It was along the same road that one morning we found a single but superb female Montague’s Harrier quartering the fields. A morning following overnight cloud and a cool start saw a movement of 15/20 Red-footed Falcons quite high in the sky and drifting steadily north. We found a single female on a roadside post which gave us a short but spectacular hunting display above a thistle-filled field before she too hurried on. When we checked the road the very next morning all the falcons had gone, along with hundreds of Swifts that had filled the sky.

To Cavalleria

Damselfly

Near Cap de Cavelleria

Es Prat, Tirant

Es Mercadal

Es Grau produced water birds like Coot, Gadwall, Little Grebe, Great Crested Grebe, Purple Heron, Grey Heron and Little Egret. Yellow-legged Gulls nest here but I think the much less common Audouin’s Gull nest only on offshore islands.