Garden Top Ten

Thanks to the Wuhan Flu and house arrest it seems we are all to become garden birdwatchers until further notice. 

Just in time then to read of the latest results from the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, an event held over the weekend of 25-27 January 2020 when nearly half a million people counted almost eight million birds. It made this year’s Birdwatch one of the biggest ever. 

The RSPB even produced a Top Ten, a list that depending upon a particular location may not equate to all gardens but represents a combined average result from the whole of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. 

Here they are in one to ten order; a list to bring tears to eyes of WhatsApp “bird news” groups. Not a single “scarce or rare” among them. In the archives of Another Bird Blog I found a picture for each of the species, useful ID pointers for those who have little or no time for common birds. 

The figure in brackets is a guesstimate of the top ten in my own garden for an average January day. In our garden, Magpie is replaced by Dunnock, a much nicer prospect. Magpies aren’t around because I chase them off as soon as they appear:

1. House Sparrow (10)
2. Starling (8)
3. Blue Tit (5)
4. Woodpigeon (2)
5. Blackbird (3)
6. Goldfinch (1)
7. Great Tit (4)
8. Robin (6)
9. Long-tailed Tit (9)
10. Magpie (0)
10. Dunnock

House Sparrow 

Starling 

Blue Tit 

Woodpigeon

Blackbird

Goldfinch 

Great Tit 

Robin

Long-tailed Tit

Dunnock

The RSPB Top Ten of the changes little from 2019, with the top three birds the same as last year. Again, the Number One spot is taken by the House Sparrow, making it first for seventeen years running. Meanwhile the House Sparrow is nowadays an uncommon visitor to our ample sized semi-rural garden. Here the House Sparrow struggles to even hit the charts, despite the RSPB report suggesting that their numbers appear to have increased by 10% in the last ten years. 

The RSPB detect movement at fourth and fifth, with the Woodpigeon moving up to four and, last year’s number four the Blackbird falling to five. This is not surprising given the highly adaptive pigeon’s abundance here in Stalmine that gives the species an easy runner-up place in our garden list. This commonality is explained by a nearby mix of farmland, many trees, thick hedgerows, tolerant residents and few shooters. 

Small birds like Long-tailed Tits (up by 14% on 2019), Wrens (up 13%) and Coal Tits (up 10%) counted well during a mild, wet winter that came with very few frosts and little snow. The 14% for Long-tailed Tits also accounts for it remaining high on our local list as a past breeding species in the berberis bush; and a regular visitor likely to nest again. 

The report showed that Chaffinch dropped from the top ten down to number 11. This placing reflects very recent news that this once abundant farmland bird is the latest species in trouble through agricultural changes and over-building on green land and woodland edge. Sadly the Chaffinch is no longer a regular in our own garden. 

Losers out this time included Song Thrush way down at 20th in 2020, seen in just 9% of all gardens. Compare this to earlier Big Garden Birdwatches of 1979 -2009 when the Song Thrush made a top ten appearance in every year. In our garden, the once common Song Thrush is both "scarce and rare".  

It's a surprise the Goldfinch doesn’t even make the RSPB top five when here in Stalmine it is far and away the most common garden bird at any time of year. Perhaps the Goldfinch is not yet a city bird where many of the Big Garden Birdwatchers reside? 

Greenfinch is another big loser over the span of the Big Garden Birdwatch, a reflection of a major nationwide decline in its population. It came in at 18th and was seen in just 14% of gardens, this itself a worrying drop of 8% on 2019. We have a pair of Greenfinches in the garden so we count ourselves rather lucky in many ways. 

And the cherry blossom smells just wonderful. 

 Cherry Blossom

Stalmine

At least the good weather means we don’t sit in in the house and watch TV.  I’m told there are still people who pay a TV Licence fee for the privilege of having their intelligence insulted!   

Meanwhile, the Government is in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation.  A relaxation of the lockdown advice will be pounced on by TV and newspaper media and used to whip up even more public hysteria.  The effect this media-generated madness is having on an already browbeaten population has been leapt upon as an excuse for a monumental power grab by the illiberal left, forever eager to bring down an elected Government.  

Back soon with Another Bird Blog and tales of The Great Escape.

Keep Your Distance

Birds are well practised in social distancing; in fact they are experts. When was the last time if ever you were closer than two metres to a wild bird? The long lens on a modern digital SLR camera can play tricks with our understanding of a bird’s tolerance of being too close for comfort; many a togger has fallen foul of the cardinal rule of “keep your distance”. 

Bird Photographers

There’s a good reason birds stay away from man. Man is the apex predator, top of the food chain. Ever since Neanderthals roamed the earth with stone-tipped spears, birds have been there for the taking once nuts, roots and leaves fell out of fashion. Stone-age man could hunt and kill anything they wanted to eat. From small birds up to the largest mammals. Their world was but a meaty oyster.  

Birds became a source of food, literally “fair game” in every part of the world. Birds were used as clothing adornments, jewellery, status symbols, or pets in a cage to sing for their supper. Birds are both “sport” and a gourmet meal to the present day shooting fraternity - geese, ducks, grouse, snipe, woodcock and even gold-spangled plovers to be enjoyed with a glass of the finest chateau. You name it, they shoot it.

Nestlings of wild falcons, hawks, eagles and owls are partially tamed and manipulated to become man’s slaves, for amusement or to hunt other lesser animals for their only master. But as the falconer may discover later, when the beast slips the jesses and flies far away, “you can take a bird from the wild, but you can’t take the wild from a bird”. 

Golden Eagle

Small songbirds can be "habituated" to the presence of humans. They may not immediately fly away when a human appears but they are still wild. The human becomes a part of the background of the bird's environment and for now they accept the close proximity of a human as normal and non-threatening. 

In North America a number of common songbirds become so habituated with close human interaction that they can be eventually "trained" to take food from the hand at an arm’s length. Some of the "braver" birds accustomed to the presence of humans include Tufted Titmouse, Chickadees, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Nuthatches and House Sparrows. 

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Chickadee

N.B. Trying this on with a street-wise UK House Sparrow will get you absolutely nowhere. 

Here in the UK the crow family of Ravens, Carrion Crows, Jackdaws and Jays are well known for their propensity to forget social distancing. Blackbirds, Robins, the tit family and European Nuthatches will occasionally join in the fun and leave aside the rules of engagement. I once lost a shiny biro to an inquisitive Magpie when testing the theory that the crow family are entranced by man’s glossy baubles, if not necessarily by man’s proximal charms.

Great Tit

Man with Magpie - Real Fix Magazine

There’s not a lot we humans can teach birds about social distancing but maybe we can at least respect their reasons for mostly wishing to be distant from us. We must always remember that there is no such thing as a naturally tame wild bird. We are their greatest enemy. 

    

"Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious."  David Attenborough.

Here in Lockdown Britain Sue and I are staying well and sticking to the rules to avoid the Wuhan virus.  But with the best spell of weather for six months or more, many of the natives are getting restless, setting off for the seaside, heading for the hills or lying in the park.  

Grey Squirrel

We’re content to stay at home for now if even the garden birds are somewhat limited. Meanwhile a local squirrel tries to lift the lid and find out what is really in there.

     

Back To The Future

Get used to it you birders. This is the dystopian, authoritarian future. The current lockdown is just a dress rehearsal for the real thing of the not too distant future. 

The Department for Transport has launched a consultation paper which calls for a major move from cars into cycling, walking and buses, but has told few people about it. 

The paper, Decarbonising Transport: Setting the Challenge, crept out on March 26. Citing the Government’s 2050 net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions target, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps writes of a vision where - “Public transport and active travel will be the natural first choice for our daily activities. We will use our cars less and be able to rely on a convenient, cost-effective and coherent public transport network.” 

He adds: “From motorcycles to HGVs, all road vehicles will be zero emission and technological advances . . . will change the way vehicles are used.” 

How will the reduction in private transport be achieved? By making private cars too expensive for ordinary people? Rationing cars to one per family? Rationing mileage  by road charging? Or maybe we will end up with scenes observed this week, where the authorities allow car travel for specific purposes only? Or more worryingly, cars for elite sections of society only - politicians by any chance? 

Animal Farm

Fortunately, happier thoughts are to be found in Another Bird Blog archives from December 2014 when I asked the question “Do Birds Smell?”.

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It’s a question I asked myself a number of years ago when noting how long it took for birds to discover new sources of food, in particular the introduction of bird feeders where none had been used previously. 

Birds were always thought to have a very poor sense of smell. But most vultures and many scavenging seabirds locate their food by smell. Any birder who has been on a pelagic trip to see seabirds up close will be familiar with the practice of chucking overboard buckets of “chum” or “rubby-dubby”, to lure shearwaters and petrels close to the boat. 

Manx Shearwater

Wilson's Storm Petrel

Scientists believe that other birds, e.g. homing pigeons, may use familiar odours in finding their way home or use their sense of smell during migratory journeys. Think about the various odours given off to overflying birds by different places, e.g. pine forest or ancient deciduous woodland, saline or fresh water, the urban jungle or the countryside. 

Egyptian Vulture 

A recent Dutch study determined that Great Tits found and located apple trees with winter moth infestations and big concentrations of caterpillar larvae by smell rather than sight. Tit species eat large numbers of insect larvae particularly during their breeding seasons when they feed them to their young, timing their breeding to do so. Trees benefit from the protection offered by birds removing larvae that would otherwise go on to eat the leaves and perhaps impact on tree growth and productivity 

Great Tit 

The Dutch experiments were designed to remove other possible ways in which the Great Tits might detect the winter moth larvae. The researchers removed the caterpillars, removed leaves with holes and even took away signs of ‘caterpillar poo’, ensuring no visual clues were left for the birds to locate the infested trees. Despite these measures the Great Tits repeatedly found the trees with larvae infestations. 

The results were clear, even when they couldn’t see the trees, the Great Tits homed in on trees with winter moth infestations when they could smell them. The researchers believe the trees gave off chemicals which birds can detect by smell to alert them to infestation. It has long been known that many plants attract insects using smells and benefit from the relationships as a result, but this is the first time they have been shown to attract birds in the same way. 

More research is needed to determine which chemicals are involved but infested trees were found to release more of a chemical responsible for the “green” smell of apples. 

Most bird feeders use metal/plastic tubes or wire mesh to make the food highly visible to birds and we naturally assume that birds start to use our bird feeders because they locate food via their keen eyesight. My new niger seed feeders arrived today, replacements for ones recently stolen from a ringing site. At first glance the design looks improbable and unlikely to work as the feeding holes are tiny. When the stainless steel cylinder is filled with niger, the seed is virtually invisible with just the tiniest point of an individual seed poking through a hole. 

Bird Feeders 

Nevertheless I experimented with this design of feeder a number of years ago and found them to be highly successful in attracting Goldfinches, Siskins and Lesser Redpolls very quickly and I attributed some of this to the birds’ ability to smell the seed. 

Goldfinches 

Here’s an experiment anyone can try at home. Buy a sealed bag of niger seed, open the bag and stick your nose in it. Then inhale and enjoy the sweet, oily, nutty fragrance which brings in those Goldfinches 

There’s is no doubt in my mind that birds and in particular Goldfinches have well developed olfactory senses, probably as good as our own. 

Now you must excuse me. From the kitchen I detect the unmistakable aroma of a tandoori chicken sizzling on the grill. 

Tandoori Chicken

I'm ready for a bite to eat. Back soon with more tasty morsels from the past.

Linking today with Anni's Blog and Eileen's Saturday Blog.

Working From Home.

Sue. “You call that work?”. 

“I am at my place of work with a cup of coffee. Blogging, replying to emails or reading the latest news. It keeps my mind active, enquiring and less likely to putrefy with old age". 

No PR spin, no advertising and no corporate agenda - there are Internet sites that uphold the lost art of journalism. Fake news, PR spin and post-truth politics; we live in a world where the information we digest cannot be relied upon; where the manipulation of news for political, corporate or personal agendas is rife; where journalists are vilified, threatened or silenced for exposing corruption, crimes, injustice or for airing non-woke views. 

So how do we, as readers, get closer to the truth? While no reporting is entirely without bias, there are still, thankfully, some sources of news and information that work against the grain by undermining traditional media and attempting to reveal hidden truths. 

”When you’ve finished festering and looking for the truth, the outside windows need a clean and the grass needs cutting”. 

“Yes Dear”. 

However, after a skim over with the reluctant to start Mountfield, the grass, or “lawn” as we Brits prefer to call it, looks just fine. And the damson tree is in full blossom even if the autumn fruit is inevitably full of grubs. 

Today I’m working from home so looked for an archived piece to delight readers; it’s where I found this item about how other people see the legend that is The British Twitcher . 

From Another Bird Blog of December 15 2013. A well written, partly satirical, but ultimately truthful read about birding, guaranteed to make us laugh again during these dispiriting days. 

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From The Washington Post 15th December 2013. 

GREAT YARMOUTH, England — Garry Bagnell is cruising down an English country road when his beeper lights up with a bulletin. A Shorelark - a distinctive bird with yellow and black markings took a wrong turn somewhere over Norway and is getting its bearings on a beach an hour’s drive north. Time to step on the gas. 

Shorelark

Britain’s wild world of competitive bird-watching can be a truly savage domain, a nest of intrigue, fierce rivalries and legal disputes. 

“I need that bird, I need it,” said Bagnell, a 46-year-old accountant and hard-core practitioner of British twitching, or extreme and extremely competitive bird-watching. 

“When a bird you haven’t seen drops, you’ve got to chase it. That’s going to bring me up to 300 different species spotted for the year.  You don’t understand how competitive this is. For some people, this is life and death.” 

Beyond these shores, the world of bird-watching may be a largely gentle place ruled by calm, binocular-toting souls who patiently wait for their reward. But in Britain, it can be a truly savage domain, a nest of intrigue, fierce rivalries and legal disputes. Fluttering somewhere between sport and passion, it can leave in its path a grim tableau of ruined marriages, traffic chaos and pride, both wounded and stoked. This is the wild, wild world of British twitching. 

Britain isn’t the only place that has hatched a culture of fierce bird-watching. In the United States, book-turned-Hollywood-film “The Big Year” chronicled the quest of three men vying in long-held American competitions to spot the most number of species in a single year. Nevertheless, observers say the intensity of the rivalries and the relative size of the twitching community here, numbering in the thousands, singled out British birders as some of the most relentless in the world. 

One of the fiercest rivalries, for instance, pits Bagnell’s former mentor and now nemesis, Lee Evans, against 41-year-old grocer Adrian Webb. Evans, 53, dubs himself the “judge, jury and executioner” of British bird-watching and keeps his own twitcher rankings. To take on the master, Webb took 12 months off from work in 2000, spending $22,000 and driving 88,000 miles to break Evans’s record of 386 species of birds seen on the British Isles in one year. They trash-talk on the birding circuit like prize fighters. 

“Evans is a bit of a strange bloke,” said Webb, who is known to drop his grocer’s apron and turn on a dime to chase a rare bird, and claims to have broken Evans’s record in 2000. “He doesn’t like people who he thinks are a threat to him. If someone has seen more birds than him, he doesn’t like it. If someone sees a bird that he hasn’t, he doesn’t like that, either.”

Evans - a figure so polarising on the birding circuit that his name is routinely smeared on rivals’ blogs and in online forums, does not recognise Webb’s claim to the title.

Over the years, Evans has racked up big legal bills defending himself against allegations of slander for allegedly under-counting the tallies of rivals and questioning whether they’ve actually seen all the birds they claim.

He dismissively calls Webb a “chequebook birder”- one who will spend any sum to reach birds spotted even on distant islands miles off the British coast. Evans also insists that he has been the victim of underhanded tricks, citing an incident when he was racing to see a rare bird in Scotland. He had lined up a plane to take him to a sighting on a remote island only to find that a group of rival birders had stuffed the palm of his pilot “with a few extra quid” to take them instead. 

“In America, bird-watching is still mostly a pastime,” said Evans, who is on his fourth marriage and blames his divorces partly on his obsession with twitching. “But in Britain, bird-watching can be bitter. It can be real nasty business.” 

A term coined in the 1960s to describe the jaw-rattling sound of chasing after rare birds on rumbling motorbikes, “twitchers” are narrowly defined as bird-watchers willing to drop everything to chase a sighting.  More broadly, it includes those who make their way to see a bird within a few minutes of an urgent bulletin.

Such bulletins are typically sent out by services such as the Rare Bird Alert, which obtains its information in real time from a vast network of bird-watchers across Britain. Once notified of a sighting, the service issues urgent messages to its 21,000 subscribers via pay-by-the-month pagers and smartphone apps. 

In one of dozens of similar scenes of “twitcher madness” here, local police were forced to cordon off streets after hundreds of desperate bird-watchers descended on a suburban home in Hampshire last year when a rare Spanish Sparrow fluttered into somebody’s garden. 

Spanish Sparrow 

For a mostly male sport with an average age over 50, however, twitching can also tempt fate. In October, a top British twitcher, Tim Lawman, had a heart attack while on the trail of a Radde’s Warbler in Hampshire. “It was a new bird for him, and in all the excitement of rushing to see it, he just keeled over and died,” Evans said. 

A popular smartphone app to help British birders is being advertised as an essential tool when “there have even been recent cases of violent clashes between bird watchers as people desperately try to get the very best spots.” In 2009, Bagnell said, he and other twitchers were aghast when two elderly rivals on the circuit went for each other’s throats. “One was saying he’d seen a bird, and the other said he didn’t believe him,” Bagnell said.

Though most twitchers are bird-lovers, the sport is mostly about the chase.  Bagnell, for instance, drove 90 minutes and searched the ground for a half-hour before he spotted the coy Shorelark in beach scrub. He eyed it for a few moments before tweeting his find, then moved on. “I’ve got another bird to get three hours away,” he said.

The most unfortunate twitchers race many miles to spot a bird only to find that their flighty subjects have flown off - a bummer known in the twitching world as a “dip.” One of the most infamous dips came as Webb pursued a long-tailed shrike in the Outer Hebrides off mainland Scotland. The boat he and 12 others had hired died in choppy waters, forcing a daring rescue by Her Majesty’s Coastguard. “We were worried for our lives for a bit, but we were more worried about not seeing this bird,” he said. 

Within the world of twitching, there are countless rankings; lifetime lists, annual lists, semiofficial lists, slightly more official lists. Such rankings are partly predicated on evidence. When you saw that Velvet Scoter in Wales, were there witnesses? How about photographs? If not, claims all come down to trust. 

Velvet Scoter

Many see twitching as an outcrop of the British fascination with “spotting” things - most notoriously, trainspotting, a hobby that involves the obsessive pursuit of seeing as many locomotives with your own eyes as humanly possible. But others say it may simply be a case of boys who refuse to grow up.

Twitchers 

“Years ago, British boys used to spend their childhoods collecting birds’ eggs or stamps - now you wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing,” said Brian Egan, manager of the Rare Bird Alert. “But what they can do as adults is chase sightings of rare birds. So that’s what they do.” 

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Dear Reader. In 2020 the scene is as mad if not more insane than ever.  Following the decline in even once common birds, almost every species becomes a target for the year lister.  More so for those with little interest in birds but drawn to the British obsession with collecting.

And just like me, here's someone else working from home. Wilson, The Border Collie.

Border Collie

There's more bird watching madness from Another Bird Blog soon. Don't be late.

A Curlew Tale

Here’s an archived post from 31 January 2014 about the species gracing the blog header photo, the Curlew - Numenius arquata.  There’s an interesting connection between a Curlew and John Lennon - read on. 

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After two weeks in the Lanzarote sunshine one of the long list of holiday emails awaiting response was one from the BTO.  It concerned the recovery of a Curlew ringed a three and a half years before on 9th June 2010. 

That morning Will and were in the hills above the market town of Garstang on the western edge of the Bowland hills, on the lookout for wader chicks to ring. 

Curlew nest

We found a couple of broods of Curlew chicks that day and eventually tracked down one set of youngsters. This despite the frantic and determined efforts of the adult birds to see us off their home patch with their loud, shrieking and frantic calls.  

Curlew

Curlew chicks

Ring number FC79566 was one of a brood of four healthy chicks ringed that day. 

Fast forward to 13 January 2014; Liverpool John Lennon Airport alongside the estuary of the River Mersey, 7 kms southeast of Liverpool city centre and some 62 kms from Garstang. 

Liverpool Airport and The Mersey Estuary

An airport worker conducting routine checks of the runways to ensure the safety of planes landing and taking off found the freshly dead corpse of FC79566. By now the bird would be an experienced adult that probably wintered each year in the same area. 

Thankfully the worker had the good sense to report the finding to the BTO. This is where we came into the picture again with a little Internet digging and an opportunity to add more detail to the life history of FC79566. 

I contacted the Operations Planner at the airport Andrew Hepworth who told me that the bird was probably hit by an aircraft but as no pilot reported a possible strike, the cause of death could not be confirmed.  Andrew went on to say that due to their proximity to the Mersey estuary the time of year  (winter) results in large numbers of Curlews close by. Groups of Curlews regularly fly over the aerodrome fence boundary and settle on the airfield. As a result the resident bird control operators constantly shift them back over the fence and toward to the shores of the estuary below.

Curlew  

“As you appreciate we get our fair share of dead birds/strikes and these tend to be Curlew, Woodpigeon, gull species, Swifts during the summer, and the odd Kestrel." 

In 2002 Liverpool Aiport was renamed in honour of John Lennon, a founding member of The Beatles, 22 years after Lennon's death in December 1980. A 7 ft tall bronze statue stands overlooking the check-in hall, and a tribute to the Beatle’s well known song Yellow Submarine graces the entrance to the airport. 

Liverpool Airport 

John Lennon

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There's one thing for sure.  I reckon I'll not be going to Liverpool or any other airport in the next few weeks or months.

There are still too few birds in the garden to catch. The Goldfinches have cleared away to breed elsewhere apart from a few local pairs that visit the garden.  

There's Greenfinch in regular song, mostly in the next garden and in the dividing conifers a Woodpigeon sat on a nest with eggs.

Greenfinch  

On Friday afternoon while sat in the sunshine I heard the familiar "tac,tac,tac", but no song  of a Blackcap and then glimpsed one as it slipped through the ivy and hawthorn.  I've not seen or heard one since but they do breed very close by each year. 

Within our small close of six dwellings we have at least two pairs of Robins, Blackbirds, Dunnocks and Wrens. And the first House Martins are due soon. Always a welcome sight but more so this year.   
         

  

Book Review

I’m due for a couple of new books soon from Princeton University Press and their WildGuides series. With all that’s going on there could be delays to bring my readers new book reviews.  

For today’s post I raided the archive again with an earlier book review from 26 June 2014.  The book, A Sparrowhawk's Lament  is still available and remains highly recommended.

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Today there’s a review of A Sparrowhawk’s Lament: How British Breeding Birds of Prey Are Faring, a newly published book by David Cobham with Bruce Pearson.

There is a fascination with birds of prey which can propel them into headline news, not just rare bird bulletins, but very often the TV news and the popular press. Sometimes it is good news but very often there is controversy, disagreement or debate around birds of prey where the quarrels reach into politics and beyond, even the Royal Family.

Enquire of a bird watcher their favourite bird. More often than not the answer will be a bird of prey, even though in the course of everyday bird watching many British birds of prey are difficult to engage with as we glimpse them but briefly.  Such is the passion for raptors that on occasions, perhaps yearly, bird watchers travel long distances, making costly and time consuming special journeys to see birds of prey like Goshawk, Honey Buzzard, Golden Eagle or White-tailed Eagle.

When Princeton University Press sent a copy of A Sparrowhawk’s Lament for review on Another Bird Blog I admit to niggling thoughts about the need for yet another book about birds of prey. What might be added to current knowledge on the subject, and who might stump up £25 for a new one.?

With so many books devoted to raptors already out there it was hard to imagine where a new volume might begin and end.

A Sparrowhawk’s Lament - Princeton University Press 

So I got stuck into A Sparrowhawk’s Lament: How British Breeding Birds of Prey Are Faring, a book containing 15 chapters, one for each British Breeding Bird of Prey together with the obligatory Introduction and Conclusion. That translates to roughly 20 pages to each species, good sized chunks with which to digest the contents and consider a verdict.

From the beginning I was struck with the detail and sheer readability of the text and finished the first 40 pages of the Introduction, The Sparrowhawk and The Osprey without a break.

A Sparrowhawk’s Lament - Princeton University Press 

I live in the North West of England, just a flap and a glide from the infamous Bowland Hills, and where after 200 years of persecution the Hen Harrier has been wiped from the landscape. Therefore I took a particular interest in the chapter devoted to Circus cyaneus, the original Silver Ghost, the Hen Harrier.

These 20 pages make for illuminating, disturbing and often emotional reading, from the crucified Hen Harrier on a barn door, the introduction of the double-barrelled breech-loading shotgun, Famous Grouse whisky, on through quad-biked keepers kitted out with night-vision goggles. The chapter  ends with a moving poem about the predictable fate of Bowland Beth. Read it all, I think you may never buy Famous Grouse again and will in all probability have a tear in your eye.

Fortunately not all of the chapters make for reading as depressing as the saga of the Hen Harrier, the magnificent Golden Eagle or the elusive Goshawk, with chapters charting success stories like Buzzard, Hobby, Montagu’s Harrier, Red Kite and Honey Buzzard to redress the balance somewhat.

Red Kite from A Sparrowhawk’s Lament - Princeton University Press 

By the time I reached The Conclusion at page 269 my own thought was that the book’s sub-title rather undersells it. A Sparrowhawk’s Lament is much more than a summary of how British birds of prey are faring in 2014, more like an entertaining read about the historical, cultural and even literary background to British raptors. The chapters are peppered with anecdotes, experiences and observations from the author and conservationists engaged in the study, safeguard or re introductions of such species. This detail gives the whole book an instructive, authentic, expert, and above all a caring feel for our often maligned UK raptors.

David Cobham has spent a lifetime studying birds and is a vice president of the Hawk and Owl Trust. In addition he is a film and television producer and director, notable for such films as The Goshawk, The Vanishing Hedgerows, and Tarka the Otter. The author’s Acknowledgements for his interviewees reads as a who’s who of raptor expertise, including luminaries such as as Ian Newton, Roy Dennis, Robin Prytherch, Wilf Norman and the late Derek Ratcliffe.

The book is generously sprinkled with more than 90 black & white illustrations by Bruce Pearson. These vignettes add greatly to the accompanying text in providing a perfect fit to the overall feel of the book.

All in all A Sparrowhawk’s Lament is a desirable little volume which I thoroughly enjoyed, and one I can recommend to blog readers for the next rainy, non-birding day.

A Sparrowhawk’s Lament: How British Breeding Birds of Prey Are Faring: David Cobham with Bruce Pearson. Princeton University Press - $35.00 / £24.95

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In 2014 this book cost $35.00 / £24.95.

The price in 2020 is now $45.00 / £38.00 - still a bargain and just the job for those locked in rainy days when the garden or a walk isn’t an option at Princeton Press.

If you don’t mind a nicely kept but used version there’s a range of prices at Abe Books.

Back to birding soon on Another Bird Blog.

Linking this new post to Anni's Birding Blog.

Boxed In

We’re not so much boxed in. More like locked in and fastened down until the experts say it’s safe to go outdoors. I doubt we’ll get to check nest boxes in 2020.

Here’s a previous visit to nest boxes at Oakenclough at the foot of the Pennine Hills back in the early summer of 31 May 2015. 

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As promised, here is an update on a visit to Oakenclough on Saturday to check with Andy the progress of his nest boxes. 

The target bird for the nest box project is Pied Flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca), a small passerine bird of the Old World flycatcher family and part of a group of insectivorous songbirds which feed by darting after insects. 

Pied Flycatcher

This flycatcher winters in tropical Africa, spending the summer in the northern hemisphere but as far south as the Iberian Peninsula where it is quite common. 

Pied Flycatcher  

Pied Flycatchers breed in upland broad-leaved woodland. This means that in Britain they are limited due to geography mainly to the North and West where they prefer mature oak woodland with natural tree holes, i.e. dead trees, or dead limbs on healthy trees. 

The species also takes readily to nest boxes with high horizontal visibility, in woodland where there is a low abundance of shrub and understorey, but a high proportion of moss and grass for their nests. 

Andy - checking a box 

As is usually the case,  a good number of the boxes checked were occupied by Great Tit or Blue Tit with the adults still brooding tiny youngsters or sitting on clutches as low as 4 eggs or as high as 14 eggs. Given that the weather in the month of May has been mostly poor, the progress so far has been better than expected. 

Pied Flycatcher 

We found one box contained Nuthatches and ringed 6 youngsters. Four boxes were occupied by Pied Flycatchers where we found females sitting on either 6 or 7 eggs and where by a week or so the youngsters will be large enough to be ringed. 

The eggs of the Pied Flycatcher are about 18 mm by 13 mm in size, pale blue, smooth and glossy. The female builds the nest of leaves, grass, moss and lichens, and then lines the cup with hair and wool. The duties of incubating the eggs are performed by the female with the newly-hatched young fed by both adults. 

Pied Flycatcher nest and eggs

Pied Flycatcher

The eggs of the Pied Flycatcher are about 18 mm by 13 mm in size, pale blue, smooth and glossy. The female builds the nest of leaves, grass, moss and lichens, and then lines the cup with hair and wool. The duties of incubating the eggs are performed by the female with the newly-hatched young fed by both adults. 

The Pied Flycatcher is a well-studied species, partly because of its willingness to use nest boxes provided by bird watchers and bird ringers. 

Detailed study has found that Pied Flycatchers practice polygyny, usually bigamy, with the male travelling large distances to acquire a second mate. The male will mate with the secondary female and then return to the primary female in order to help with aspects of child rearing, such as feeding. There are a number of theories around how this apparently poor system benefits the species, but no one knows for sure except that in practice it does work. 

In 2005 the European population of Pied Flycatcher was estimated at up to 12 million pairs, helped in part by the provision of nest boxes in parts of the species’ range. We checked our ringing site for Willow Warbler nests and found at one nest a brood of tiny youngsters, at another nest a female sat on 6 eggs. Dotted around the site a good number of males are in steady song with little sign of their mates, suggesting that most are still at the stage of incubating eggs. Willow Warblers are now a little late this year, no doubt as a result of the poor Spring weather to date. 

Willow Warbler

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Fast Forward to 2020. People aren’t perfect. Some slow to adjust while others appear to be in denial that coronavirus is something to be taken seriously.  The vast majority are trying to stick to the rules as best they can while doing the necessary to put food on the table and stay sane.

Back soon with Another Bird Blog.

Until then, linking with Eileen's Blogging.