Back In Time

Three more weeks in captivity is the sentence. While we’re waiting for the starting pistol here’s an earlier post of Another Bird Blog from June 2017. The day promised a visit to the Bowland Hills, “England’s Answer to Tuscany”, about 20 miles away from the Flat Fylde coast where I live. 

With luck there will be a chance to revisit the hills in June 2020 for what is a highlight of any birding year. 

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I took lots of pictures up in Bowland this morning, almost 400, easily packed onto half of an SD card. I know there are some who refuse to abandon the traditional 35mm film photography, but give me digital photography, computers and Photoshop any old day.

It was a morning of waders again with a number of Snipe on show, plus Redshanks and Oystercatchers with young. I even managed a picture of the very shy Red Grouse. Other highlights of the morning included two Ring Ouzel, Turdus torquatus –“the mountain blackbird”, and at least one Cuckoo.

Click the pics for a closer look.

Ring Ouzel 

At this time of year Redshanks are always on the lookout for predators and will shout endless warnings from a prominent place advising their young to stay out of sight.

Redshank 

Redshank

Oystercatchers do the same. It’s not that they like to pose for the camera, their parental duties are foremost in their reaction to the wound down window of a vehicle.

Oystercatcher 

Oystercatcher

Red Grouse 

The Red Grouse is an unmistakable bird - plump and round, with a gingery-red body as its name suggests. Found on upland heath, it is under threat from a nationwide, dramatic loss of these habitats.

Red Grouse

Snipe seemed especially active this morning whereby I saw 8/10 individuals in poses, behaviour or voice that suggested they also have young.

Snipe 

Snipe 

Snipe

Snipe 

Bowland 

Bowland 

A barely fledged Redshank  had quickly learnt about using dry stone walls as a parent looks on.

Redshank 

Redshank chick

Redshank

Pied Wagtails and Meadow Pipits are probably the two most common and conspicuous birds in these parts. Sadly, the Lapwing population has tumbled for many years.

Pied Wagtail 

Meadow Pipit 

 Lapwing

Bowland, Lancashire

At Langden there's a memorial stone to airmen killed in the Second World War that makes for sombre reading at anytime.

War Memorial - Langden, Bowland 

That's all for today. Come back soon for more birding, photographs or ringing with Another Bird Blog.

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April 2020. Update to that Red Grouse. 

Torching heather, popular with gamekeepers but bad for the environment, is now outlawed in several upland areas of northern England The controversial practice of setting heather-covered moorland on fire, carried out by gamekeepers to create more attractive habitats for grouse is now banned on more than 30 major tracts of land in northern England. 

Heather Burning - Getty images

"Three large landowners have confirmed that their tenants are no longer allowed to burn heather routinely. The ban is a blow to grouse shoots, which burn older heather to make way for younger, more nutritious plants for grouse to feed on, but environmental groups say the practice harms the environment. Research by the University of Leeds has found that burning grouse moors degrades peatland habitat, releases harmful altering gases, reduces biodiversity and increases flood risk 

The issue has been thrown into sharp relief by the coronavirus outbreak. Yorkshire Water and United Utilities have said that all burning on their land must now cease until further notice. 

The National Trust said: “We are keen to alleviate pressure on the emergency services, and are working with estate managers and tenants to ensure any burning is stopped immediately.” The move follows requests from emergency services and local councils, which fear that burning increases the risk of wildfires, and that fumes might affect people suffering from Covid-19."

Linking this post to Eileens Blog and Anni's Blog in North America. Give them a visit. 

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.