Showing posts with label Red-footed Falcon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red-footed Falcon. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

It’s An Ill Wind

Even the most enthusiastic birder needs an occasional rest day after too many bleary eyed starts so I took a few days off. Wednesday looked ok but forecasts for the rest of the week showed strengthening winds from the east so we decided on Wednesday and a less than ideal 8-12 mph. I met up with Andy and Will at the appointed 0630 and we turned our cars to face into the breeze so as to use the ringing offices of the combined hatchbacks. 

The surface of the Grizedale reservoir rippled east to west and we suspected a slow session to be on the cards whereby net rides adjacent to the private access road are open to the elements of an easterly. 

Unlike the southern counties of England we have had our share of rain with no need for hose pipe bans or panic stations following two weeks of hot weather. Here in the West, 2022 has been the most average of summers devoid of any climate catastrophes. Current water levels in the reservoir are equal to if not slightly higher than August 2018 as seen in the video below.  And any day now the pent up rains will begin, just as they always do.

  

Our early suspicions were confirmed with a catch of just 9 birds - 3 Willow Warbler, 2 Blackcap, 1 Meadow Pipit, 1 Goldcrest and horror of horrors, two Blue Tits. 

Blackcap

Meadow Pipit

Goldcrest

Willow Warbler
 
There was a smidgeon of obvious and visible migration with both Swallows and House Martins on the move from north to south. About 25 Swallows fed around the trees for a short time before disappearing to the south as quickly as they arrived. Meanwhile, a gang of about 50 later arriving House Martins fed on high flying insects for around an hour before they too moved west. 

Other obvious arrivals consisted of a Marsh Harrier that flew towards the west, 12/15 Pied Wagtails and 4 Grey Wagtails. Three Buzzards and 2 Ravens were more locally based, one Buzzard especially searching for a meal above the skulking and recently released Pheasant population. 

There was excitement at Marton Mere, Blackpool on Tuesday evening when a “Hobby” was seen over two and three hours and then into Wednesday morning. On Wednesday morning it was correctly identified as a Red-footed Falcon and continued to give excellent views to all and sundry. A couple of days of easterly winds are enough to frustrate us ringers but can often produce infrequent and/or unusual goodies here on the West Coast. 

Red-footed Falcon
 
The photo of Red-footed Falcon above is from Menorca, Spain, 2019.

The winds need to both change direction and to drop in strength for me. Here’s hoping.

Linking this weekend to Anni in Texas and Eileen's Blogspot.

 

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

A Smelly Subject

Here’s a story with conclusions that may not be all that surprising to many bird watchers. It’s about birds’ sense of smell, a subject tackled here on Another Bird Blog in December 2014. 

https://anotherbirdblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/do-birds-smell.html  

The story below is from Science Daily of July 2021 - “The fine nose of storks." 

"The sharp eyes of an eagle, the extraordinary hearing of an owl - to successfully find food, the eyes and ears of birds have adapted optimally to their living conditions. Until now, the sense of smell has played a rather subordinate role. When meadows are freshly mowed, White Storks often appear there to search for snails and frogs. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behaviour in Radolfzell and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have now studied the birds' behaviour and discovered that the storks are attracted by the smell of the mown grass. Only storks that were downwind and could thus perceive the smell reacted to the mowing. The scientists also sprayed a meadow with a spray of green leaf scents released during mowing. Storks appeared here as well. This shows that White Storks use their sense of smell to forage and suggests that the sense of smell may also play a greater role in other birds than previously thought."
 
White Storks

"For farmers around Lake Constance, it's a familiar sight: when they start mowing their meadows, storks often appear next to the tractors as if out of nowhere. The White Storks live in the wet areas around the lake, feeding on snails, frogs and small rodents that find shelter in high meadows. If these meadows are mowed, the small animals are easy prey. However, the storks do not always appear when mowing takes place. Until now, it was not known how the storks locate the rich food source. "

White Stork

"Previously, it was believed that birds relied primarily on their eyes and ears rather than their sense of smell. "It was simply assumed that birds can't smell well because they don't have real noses," says Martin Wikelski, director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. "Yet they have a very large olfactory bulb in the brain with many receptor molecules for scents." So birds have the best prerequisites for a fine nose. 

Wikelski has spent many years observing storks and researching their migratory behaviour, among other things. When he talked to his colleague Jonathan Williams about the storks' puzzling reaction to mowed meadows, Williams had an idea. Williams works at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, studying volatile organic compounds and their effects on humans and the environment. "My guess was that the storks were reacting to the intense smell of freshly cut grass," Williams says. This typical smell is produced by so-called green leaf odorants and consists of only three different molecules. "These are also added to perfumes, for example, to give them a fresh, "green" note," explains Williams. 

The researchers now wanted to find out whether the sense of smell actually leads the storks to freshly mown meadows. To do this, they monitored the birds' movements both from aircraft and via GPS sensors of tagged animals. "We first had to rule out the possibility that the storks could hear the tractor or see the mowing process," Wikelski says. Therefore, they only included storks in the observation that were more than 600 meters away from the mowed meadow and did not have direct visual contact. The researchers also made sure that the storks were not alerted to the mowing process by the behaviour of conspecifics or other birds. 

When mowing began, only the storks that were downwind flew to the meadow in question. The conspecifics that were upwind and thus could not perceive the grass smell did not react. To test whether the smell of the cut grass alone attracted the storks, the researchers switched to a meadow that had been mowed two weeks earlier. "The grass of this meadow was still very short. Therefore, it is uninteresting for the storks to forage," Wikelski explained. On this meadow, he and colleagues spread grass that had been mowed a short time before at a greater distance. A short time later, the first storks flew in and searched for food in the mown grass. 

The researchers finally mixed a solution of green leaf scents and sprayed it on a meadow with short grass. The meadow then smelled intensely of mown grass and also attracted storks from the surrounding area. "This proves that storks find their way to feeding sites via scents in the air," Williams says. This finding contradicts the previous assumption that storks primarily use their eyes to find food. Rather, the birds rely on their sense of smell to do so. "There have been storks that have flown more than 25 km from the other side of Lake Constance to mowed meadows," Wikelski says. The researchers suspect that the sense of smell may also play a greater role than previously thought in the foraging activities of other bird species." 

Birds of prey such as Buzzards, kites and falcons spring to mind. These species are regularly observed flying over or within striking distance of meadows where their sense of smell probably plays a part in their hunting prowess.

Buzzard

Red Kite

Buzzard

These scientists might be surprised to learn that experienced bird watchers already suspect that birds find their food by many methods, the sense of smell being just one of them. Birders have a nose for such things and are often ahead of the game. If only they were consulted a little more often by experts. 

Kestrel
 
Red-footed Falcon


 Story via - Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.  ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 July 2021. 

Linking this weekend to Eileen's Blogspot and Anni in Texas.


Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Little Surprise

Birders with eyes on the skies and ears to the ground will not be surprised by a RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) report that raptor persecution shows no signs of slowing down across the UK.  Are we also shocked to learn that while the figures are scandalous enough, they simply scratch the surface when many incidents go undetected and unreported? 

Another Bird Blog has alluded to this in the past when in this part of Lancashire the Common Buzzard mysteriously disappears from regular locations where countryside folk love their shoots.  Exchanges with such folk reveals a huge distaste for Buzzards, Sparrowhawks and Peregrines. In many cases the same people have little or zero knowledge of each species other than their own ingrained prejudices and misconceptions about "hook-bills". 

Buzzard 

Peregrine 

Sparrowhawk 

The RSPB revealed this week that 2018 saw 67 incidents of bird of prey persecution confirmed in England alone, equalling the previous highest in the country noted way back in 2007. These figures come as the RSPB’s Raptor Persecution Hub, originally launched in 2018, and now for the first time depicting a full 12 years' worth of confirmed raptor persecution incidents back to 2007. 

There’s an interactive map where a user can filter and search for incidents in their own locality.  The visual map makes for a better appreciation of a problem that will not go away.

RSPB - Raptor Persecution 

Over a 12-year period, 22 species of bird of prey were targeted. Species of highest conservation concern include Hen Harrier (13 incidents), Northern Goshawk (24), White-tailed Eagle (4) and Golden Eagle (14). 

Common Buzzard is the most frequently persecuted, with 428 incidents involving the species. Red Kite is in second place with 189 incidents and Peregrine Falcon - 131 in third. 

Red Kite 

Other victims include Eurasian Hobby, multiple Long-eared and Little Owls and singles of Red-footed Falcon and Eurasian Eagle-Owl. The Red-footed Falcon was well documented at the time, a well-twitched bird seen in Staffordshire and Lincolnshire before being found shot in Cambridgeshire. 

Red-footed Falcon 

There are several clear black-spots, where persecution is highly prevalent with little surprise that the majority are in areas of upland habitat, often used for driven grouse shooting: 
  •  North Yorkshire accounts for more than 10% of the 1,200+ incidents over the 2007-18 period,   with   132 at an average of 11 per year. 
  • Highland Scotland with 71 incidents (5.6%)
  • Scottish Borders at 58 incidents (4.6%) 
  • Angus at 44 incidents (3.5%) 
Shooting is the most common form of persecution with 484 confirmed such instances. Poisoning was close behind on 472. A further 194 were due to trapping of which 104 were pole/spring traps, while 30 findings were of nest destruction. 

The figures above are simply the number exposed and will have little bearing on the actual number of birds of prey targeted in the year while detection rates remain low. Mounting evidence shows that crimes against raptors are more covert as the perpetrators become more secretive in their movements. This follows the enactment of vicarious liability legislation and the increased use of satellite tags to monitor raptors and a reduction in poisoning incidents, presumably because such crimes become increasingly easy to detect. 

Buzzard 

The figures show that few areas of the UK are unaffected. It is also obvious that the highest concentration of these incidents tend to occur where the land is managed for intensive driven grouse shooting. 

The RSPB - “This data underpins the need for urgent changes which must be made to protect our magnificent birds of prey, and put an end to this appalling slaughter once and for all."

Linking today to  Anni's Birding and Eileen's Saturday Blogspot.


Tuesday, May 21, 2019

A Scops For Breakfast

There’s a story behind the Scops Owl in the picture below. It’s not the best quality photograph and that’s because it’s a photo of a photo.

"Click the pics" in turn for owls and scenes from Menorca 

Two friends of ours, Alan and Jane, who also go to Menorca each year, had arrived a few days before us. One morning while they were sat eating their breakfast, Juan Ramon the head waiter, and knowing them as birders, said that there was a strange bird in the conservatory dining room, a room unused in early May. He and other staff thought the bird might be a Hoopoe! When Alan went to look, having grabbed his camera, a Scops Owl sat at the breakfast table. As Alan approached closer a second Scops flew up from the floor and the two sat together briefly before a hastily opened door allowed them to depart. 

The picture makes for an interesting story but for a technophobe who has yet to invest in a computer, the Internet, a tablet or a Smartphone, there was no way Alan could send me a picture other than a print when he returned to Leeds in June. So when he showed me the picture, the only way for me to obtain a copy was to photograph the digital display on the back of his Nikon camera and hence lose the quality of the original. 

Scops Owl 

Our guess was that the owls had entered the building the previous night in their search for a nesting site. In previous years we have seen the owls on a nightly basis and also roosting in pines nearby. Early May of 2019 came with a cool Tramuntana wind for a number of days which made for unsuitable owling evenings when the owls would normally visit the hotel grounds. We heard them in the early hours on two or three occasions but for the first time in 15 years, failed to see a Scops Owl. 

Scops Owl 

Scops Owls are widespread across Europe with most of the population migratory, however those on the Balearic Islands including Menorca are thought to be mainly non-migratory. The Balearic race Otus scops mallorcae is also said to be slightly smaller than other races, with less bulk and a smaller wing length, the latter probably as a result of becoming less migratory over many, many years: mallorcae is also said to show less colour variation than the more widespread nominate race. 

Here’s more pictures from our time in Menorca 2019. 

Es Mercadal 

At Son Bou marsh we saw a good number of species: Cattle Egret, Squacco Heron, Grey Heron, Purple Heron, Little Egret, Glossy Ibis, Bee Eater, Marsh Harrier, Whinchat, Wheatear, Wood Sandpiper, Redshank, Greenshank, Little Ringed Plover, Woodchat Shrike,  Great Reed Warbler, Spotless Starling, Greenfinch, Goldfinch, Sardinian Warbler, Nightingale, Cetti's Warbler, Turtle Dove. 

Son Bou Marsh 

Glossy Ibis

Turtle Dove

Cala Galdana 

Cala Galdana is the best place to see Alpine Swift, Egyptian Vulture and Firecrest: three unlikely compatriots.

Egyptian Vulture 

At Tirant - Red-eared Slider

In two weeks we saw just 5 Red-footed Falcons, all second year females, scattered along an overhead cable on the road to Cap de Cavalleria on the morning of 4th May. 

Red-footed Falcon 

Red-footed Falcon 

The roads around Binimel and Cap de Cavalerria proved the best for photographing Corn Bunting, Stonechat and Tawny Pipit.

Tawny Pipit 

Stonechat 

Corn Bunting

Fornells 

Nasturtiums

Log in to Another Bird Blog another day for more birds and photos.



Thursday, May 9, 2019

A Few Days Away

We counted. This is our fifteenth time in Menorca. And yes, Menorca is that special. But it does get less quiet, much busier and more popular each year, and that's why this may be our last.

We left Joanne in charge of the house; well she is over 21. There’s very little blogging while Sue and I are away so I posted a few pictures from Menorca, both birds and photos of special places.

Don’t forget – “click the pics” for a trip to sunny Menorca.

Fornells, Menorca

Mahon, Menorca

Es Migjorn, Menorca

Coffee Time, Menorca

Fornells village, Menorca

Cattle Egret

Turtle Dove

Egyptian Vulture

Wood Sandpiper and Common Sandpiper

Menorcan Panda

Hoopoe

Es Grau, Menorca

Black-winged Stilt

Cattle Egret

Greater Short-toed Lark

Punta Nati- Menorca

Bee-eater

Audouin's Gull

Red-footed Falcon

Ciutadella - Menorca

Ciutadella - Menorca

Serrano Jamon

 Hoopoe

 Red Kite

Bee-eater

Menorcan Friends

Ensaimada and Coffee - Menorca Style

 Back soon with more news, views and photographs home and away on Another Bird Blog.



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