And There’s More

Monday was the day I couldn’t make it - Summer Holidays and Grandparents Rule. Andy had been to Oakenclough and in less than ideal conditions caught another 20 or so birds with more Willow Warblers and Blackcaps. There was even an unlikely Sedge Warbler, the second one ever up here on the edge of Pennines at 700ft above sea level. 

Tuesday’s forecast promised a better morning with less cloud and higher temperatures. At 0600 the wing gauge read zero and the reservoir resembled a sheet of glass - most unusual in this often windy, wet spot chosen as a site in which to gather rainwater.

The Reservoir 

The omens were good as the very first round saw three juvenile Willow Warblers in the nearest net. We then caught steadily until the 1030 finish mandated by a dental appointment. 

Two or three themes emerged; the continuation of movement through the site of new Willow Warblers, Chiffchaffs and Chaffinches. Also, our fourth Garden Warbler of the year. By many standards just four Garden Warblers may not seem high but after a summertime absence for many years their reappearance augurs well for the species’ return here to breed in 2021. 

A good mix of species saw 27 birds caught – 7 Willow Warbler, 4 Chaffinch, 3 Great Tit, 2 Chiffchaff,2 Goldfinch, 2 Coal Tit, 2 Blue Tit, and one each of Greenfinch, Wren, Siskin, Garden Warbler and Blackcap. 

The juvenile Siskin was almost certainly a roaming and fairly local one. We are reliably informed that North of the Border in Bonnie Scotland their Siskins still swarm around garden bird feeders like clouds of green-yellow bees. Small finches like Siskins, Redpolls and Chaffinches have little reason to leave Scotland until the weather turns inclement and/or their food depletes. 

Siskin 

2020 has seen an improvement in the fortunes of Greenfinches. Many birders report seeing better numbers and we have started to catch a few here too. The one below is a juvenile female. 

Greenfinch 

Good numbers of Chaffinches around today as there has been for a week or so. It appears that Chaffinches have had a productive breeding season. 

Chaffinch 

Seven Willow Warblers today brought our total here to 32 in the month of July as the species moves through the locality. 

Willow Warbler 

One of today’s Chiffchaffs was about as small as they come. With a wing length of 56mm and a weight of 6.8 grams it was marginally bigger than a typical Goldcrest. 

 Chiffchaff 

If this weather holds we may get a crack at the Sand Martins and/or back to Oakenclough on Friday. Stay tuned to Another Bird Blog so as not to miss out.

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” 

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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.

Willy Chiff And Others

After our not very productive ringing of Saturday, and on a slightly marginal forecast, we decided to have another go at Oakenclough on Monday. Well, after all, it is spring when many millions of birds migrate from Africa to Europe, so we might just catch a few. 

I met Andy at 0615 where he was already busy with setting the mist nets in a less than ideal 10 mph breeze but partly sheltered situation. We caught better but with a truncated finish at 1030 due to the ever strengthening easterly wind. 

There was little obvious migration however most of our catch of 15 birds proved to probable migrants - 5 Siskin , 3 Willow Warbler, 2 Blackcap, 2 Lesser Redpoll, 1 Goldfinch, 1 Chiffchaff and 1 Wren. 

This has been a pretty poor year for Lesser Redpolls, our catches below expectations. The two on Monday could well be the last until their autumn migration begins.

Siskin - adult female 

Siskin - tail of adult female 

Siskin - adult male

Lesser Redpoll

Blackcap 

Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff are both “phylloscopus” warblers, which means they are in the same bird family as each other. They also look very alike. They are both small birds with slender legs and bill. They both show greyish green and white plumage with no striking features. Field identification isn't helped by the fact that they are both very lively birds; constantly on the move, flicking through the foliage in search of flies and insects. 

Leg colour may be the easiest way to separate Chiffchaff from Willow Warbler, and while it is not fool proof it is mostly a good guideline. Chiffchaffs have black legs and Willow Warblers have light brown, flesh coloured legs. The problem with this feature is that Willow Warbler leg colour can sometimes vary and birds with dark legs have been seen but this is the rare exception to the rule. 

Willow Warblers tend to have  more pronounced supercilium but not always so, especially in the autumn time.  

Chiffchaff 

Willow Warbler

The songs of these birds could not be more different and are well worth learning. Chiffchaff is a very easy song to remember as the bird simply says its name over and over again. A loud chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff. The call is a loud "hweet". Willow Warblers have a very fluid like song consisting of descending notes and once learned is easy to remember. Call is a loud "hoo-eet". 

Although both warblers are ground nesters, Chiffchaffs tend to inhabit taller stands of deciduous trees and woodland. Willow Warblers can be found in a variety of habitat, from parks and gardens to hedges and willow copses. While on passage in spring and autumn both warblers can be found virtually anywhere. 

If you ask any experienced birder how to tell Willow Warbler from Chiffchaff, they will tell you that primary projection is the proper way to do it and as so it's worth explaining. It's not as hard as it sounds but it does requires a basic knowledge of bird topography, in particular the different groups of wing feathers and where they are situated. Basically it is the length that the primaries extend past the tertials and how this relates to the tertial length e.g. in the figure below the primary feather projection is only half the length of the tertials in Chiffchaffs. Whereas in Willow Warblers the primary projection is equal to the length of the tertials. 

Wings of Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff - PJ Grant

This “wing formula” gives a Willow Warbler a longer wing and also indicates that Willow Warblers travel further on migration - all the way to tropical Africa compared to Chiffchaff which winters in the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Linking this post to Anni's Birding and to Eileen's Saturday Birds. Take a look.

Mostly Redpoll

Thursday morning promised more in the way of migration when the weather forecast suggested a brighter start and a 5 mph breeze from a WSW direction. I met up with Andy at Oakenclough at 0630 where we were joined today by Bryan who was keen to see a few spring redpolls. 

It seemed like we were onto a winner when soon after first light came a flurry of small finches and a tiny passage of high-flying pipits in the clear visibility. After the initial burst of activity we went through a quiet patch with hardly any birds finding the nets followed by a dribble of more redpolls that did. 

There was a noticeable lack of Goldcrests and Meadow Pipits this morning, two species that should be on the move in large numbers at the end of March. At 1130 we packed in with a total of just 20 but of mostly birds with high migratory credentials: 11 Lesser Redpoll, 3 Siskin, 2 Goldfinch and one each of Great Tit, Dunnock, Treecreeper and Meadow Pipit. 

The shape and colour uniformity of the pipit’s median and greater coverts told us that the Meadow Pipit was an adult bird rather than a second calendar year. 

Meadow Pipit

Siskin

Lesser Redpoll 

Lesser Redpoll 

Lesser Redpoll

During much of the year, and certainly in March, it is virtually impossible to age or to sex a Treecreeper. 

Treecreeper 

Once home I visited the next stage of the ringing process, entering the twenty birds into DemOn (Demography Online). My blogging birding pal David Gascoigne in Ontario remarked just the other day how quickly the BTO returned information to us about a ringed Siskin we caught at Oakenclough.  

David is absolutely correct. Ringers in the UK are helped enormously by the BTO’s online system DemOn that allows the same day input of birds caught, and then with the click of a button the transfer of that data to the BTO and their national database. 

Entry page - DemOn - Demography Online - BTO

A glance at the input page of DemOn gives an example of how much data can be collected by ringers. Ringing is not simply a question of fitting a ring and then releasing that bird. Through DemOn bird ringers collect many different sets of information, much of it obligatory, other bits suited to a particular project or interest of the ringer, but all of it highly valuable to further the cause of conservation of birds. The time and place of capture together with the habitat, plus the age, sex and biometrics of the individual add new dimension to the information that ringers are able to provide about a bird’s life history. 

Linking today with Anni's Texas Birding  and Eileen's Saturday Blogspot.

Unspringlike

It was on Wednesday 20th March that I told of a ringed Siskin we caught up at Oakenclough. The super-efficient BTO with their on-line ringing database DemOn soon came up with the answer; and a good one too. 

Siskin S896866 had been ringed as an unsexed juvenile on 18 July 2017 at Cnoc, Argyll and Bute, Scotland. Although full grown Siskins can be easily assigned as either male or female, during July all juveniles appear alike. By 20 March 2019, 610 days and 282 km from Cnoc we were able to accurately age and sex it as an adult male. 

We can be pretty sure that this Siskin was born close to Cnoc in 2017 but we cannot be sure of its journeys in the intervening period. Mr Google tells me that “cnoc” is a Gaelic word for “hill” or “mount”. 

Siskin - Cnoc to Oakenclough 

 Siskin

Fast forward to this morning where Andy and I met up to another damp and misty start with a cold NW breeze, despite the forecast of a bright and sunny morning; another case of the Londoncentric mind-set that dominates UK media. 

The session began in a rather strange way with a previously unheard of phenomenon of a net containing 7 Coal Tits, none of them recaptures from previous days or carrying a ring from elsewhere. UK Coal Tits are rather sedentary and rarely travel any great distances. 

The cold wind stayed, turned more northerly and even increased slightly to put paid to the chances of any visible migration. Although there was a flurry of 10-15 Siskins about 1000, we caught none of them and finished quite early with just 14 birds - 7 Coal Tit, 2 Lesser Redpoll, 2 Blue Tit, 1 Wren, 1 Great Tit and 1 Chiffchaff. 

Lesser Redpoll 

The Chiffchaff was our first of the spring. It's a week or so early to expect a the "chiff's" close relative the Willow Warbler up here. 

Chiffchaff 

We hope to be out ringing very soon. 

Siskin Control

After almost three weeks of rubbish weather I feared there would be no ringing ever again. The perpetual winds eased on Monday when Andy managed to get up to Oakenclough for the first time since 1st March. I couldn't make it but was hopeful for later in the week. 

Andy caught the first migratory Meadow Pipits of the spring plus 3 Goldcrest, 2 Lesser Repoll and 2 Siskin, all probable migrants. 

The vast majority of Meadow Pipits returning north at this time of the year have wintered in France, the Northern Spanish coast Portugal, inland Southern Spain and Morocco. They often pile through in huge numbers, especially so if they have been held up as they have this year. The early bird catches the best breeding territory as well as the early worm. 

Meadow Pipit 

After a day of mizzle and drizzle on Tuesday the forecast of zero wind for Wednesday gave us more hope so we arranged to meet up at Oakenclough at 0630, despite the chance of early mist and light rain. 

A Misty Day 

The forecast was correct with mist/fog plus visibility down to 70 metres holding until 1130. Although we caught 20 birds, the poor conditions prevented any obvious visible diurnal movement of Meadow Pipits. 

Our 20 birds comprised 7 Siskin, 4 Chaffinch, 3 Goldcrest, 2 Goldfinch and one each of Lesser Redpoll, Brambling, Wren and Blue Tit. In the poor light all today’s photos are at ISO3200. 

One of the seven Siskins, had a ring on the left leg, immediately telling us as right-leg ringers, that we had a “control” – a bird ringed elsewhere. S896866, an adult male had probably been ringed in 2018 or early 2019. We will find out in a day or two. 

Siskin - adult male 

Siskin - adult female 

Siskin - adult female  

The single Lesser Redpoll caught was a rather dull second calendar year female. 

Lesser Redpoll- second calendar year female 

Towards the end of the session came a pleasant surprise by way of second calendar year male Brambling. Bramblings have been especially scarce during the winter, but this can be a good time of year to pick up on species as they head north from places unknown. 

Brambling - second calendar year male 

Brambling - second calendar year male 

 Wren

The Ringing Station 

Stay tuned. There's more birding, ringing and pictures soon if the weather holds good.

Linking today to Anni's Texas Birds and Eileen's Saturday Blog.