David Bradley – David Bradley

Local Peregrine Falcons – Falco peregrinus

Today, we got to a local site about 20 minutes after the pair of Peregrine Falcons that live there had gone off hunting…at least according to one birder who was leaving as we arrived. We trekked on and awaited the raptors’ return and in the meantime watched several Red Kite, some Common Buzzard, and a couple of nesting Kestrels.

The Peregrines turned up about an hour later, preyless. They darted back to their nest site in the chalk cliff. Travelling fast, but not quite at their stooping speed which can be up to 200mph. One of the pair then zoomed off again to look for lunch, leaving the other to stare at us quizzically.

Peregrine on a chalk cliff, angling its head upwards, I suspect it was getting a clearer view o me, rather than looking at anything in the sky

Peregrines often look at you from odd angles…this is perhaps because they have two sharp central focus points in each eye (the fovea centralis), rather than the one we have for each eye. In the Peregrine, one is for long-distance sharp vision that allows it to pinpoint prey from at least a couple of miles away. The second focus point is for shorter distance vision to help it see its prey clearly as it approaches during the stoop.

Peregrine basically means from abroad/foreign. In Latin per is away and egrine from agri meaning field, so “away field” = abroad. Perhaps it is suggestive of the bird somehow being a wanderer, the etymology is unclear.

Peregrine on its nest site staring directly at the photographic intruder some distance away (big zoom lens)

Falcon comes from Latin falcis, meaning curved blade/war sickle, and may allude to the curved beak, the talons, or the wing profile…again, the etymology is somewhat lost in the history of falconry.

Top security tips for everyday computer use

UPDATE: 25th March 2025 – You may have noticed the so-called security debacle surrounding the US government’s use of messaging app Signal. Somebody very stupid added a journalist to a high-level officials’ discussion group on the app and essentially betrayed a load of information that should’ve been classified. The app wasn’t hacked, their account wasn’t compromised, they weren’t even the victim of a phishing attack. They simply added the journalist for some unknown reason and the journalist let the world know how stupid US officials can be. That’s it.

For those of us who have been around computers for decades (I used my first computer in 1976!) there are some things users do to stay secure digitally speaking that seem obvious. But, those things are not necessarily obvious to new users or even those who have been using computers for a while but nobody has mentioned before. So, here are some tips:

1. Keep your system and software updated

Updates fix security vulnerabilities that hackers find and exploit. So, make sure your computer is set to update its operating system automatically. Similarly, antivirus software, web browsers, and all your applications should be regularly checked for updates. Sometimes they do this automatically, but not always. It’s also worth checking your hardware, like printers and routers, for updates to the built-in software that runs those.

2a Use a strong password

It’s important to use strong passwords ones that cannot be easily guessed or generated by software. Do this for all your accounts. There are huge lists of hacked passwords on the internet and software can easily run through simple passwords and find the weak ones.

2b Use a password manager

A good password manager such as 1password or KeePass, can help you generate strong passwords and manage them securely.

2c Don’t use the same password more than once

Don’t use the same password on different sites, if one site is compromised, then your password on those other sites will be compromised too.

2d Use two-factor authentication

Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on your important accounts (email, banking, social media). With 2FA or MFA, instead of just using your username and password to login, you have to enter a PIN, or one-time passcode, from a trusted device, like your phone, which is sent to you via SMS or from an authenticator app on your phone. Even if a hacker gets your password, they cannot login without the passcode. Make sure you store a 2FA backup code in case you lose your phone.

3. Be wary of phishing attacks, online scams, and dodgy phone calls

Never click a link in an email or open an unknown attachment even if you think you know who it came from. There are lots of ways fake emails, websites, online messages, and even phone callers will try to trick you into entering login and other details into a dodgy site. Be more than cautious of anyone asking or trying to persuade you into giving out a password, PIN, date of birth or other details. Don’t be suckered by con artists and social engineering where someone contacts you and claims to be from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or IT support etc. Nobody from any company will call you to help with your computer, ever.

4. Install & maintain security software

Windows and other operating systems often have inbuilt antivirus and firewalls, make sure they’re running and kept up to date. There’s generally no need to install a third-party antivirus on Windows computers and it will be set to keep itself updated by default.

5. Backup your important data regularly

Keep a copy of your documents, photos, and other files on an external drive or in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud). This means you don’t lose your data if your computer is stolen or fails, or you get snagged by ransomware. Better still, use two external drives and keep one in a different room from your computer and one in a different building, if you can and used cloud storage too.

Bonus tip: Be cautious on public Wi-Fi

Hackers can sometimes intercept your computer or logins if you’re connecting to an unsecured network in a hotel, cafe, or other site. If you’re out and about, use a VPN, like ExpressVPN, to hide your connection. It’s best to avoid logging into banking or sensitive accounts on public Wi-Fi unless you really have to. Even then, there’s always the option of using your phone as a personal hotspot instead of connecting to public Wi-Fi, but remember that will use up your phone data.

It’s worth adding that you might imagine a site to be unimportant and so not worry about 2FA or strong passwords. But, hackers hoping to steal your identity and then gain access to your bank account and other important sites can use tiny pieces of information they glean from hacked logins to your less important sites.

Glossary

Antivirus Software – A program designed to detect, prevent, and remove malicious software (malware) from a computer.

Authentication – The process of verifying a user’s identity before granting access to a system or account.

Authenticator app – A mobile phone app that generates a one-time password or PIN as part of 2FA, that you enter after username and password, as an extra security layer. Google, Authy, MS Authenticator are the well-known ones, but some password managers have an inbuilt authenticator app too.

Backup – A copy of important files stored separately (e.g., on an external drive or in cloud storage) to prevent data loss.

Baiting – Offering something tempting (e.g., a free USB drive infected with malware) to lure victims into compromising security.

Browser – A software application (e.g., Firefox, Chrome, Edge) used to access and navigate the internet.

Cloud Storage – Online storage services (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive) that allow users to save and access files from any internet-connected device.

Encryption – A security measure that scrambles data so that only authorized users can read it.

Firewall – A security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic to block threats.

Hacker – More properly, a cracker. A person who attempts to gain unauthorized access to systems or data, often for malicious purposes.

Hardware – The physical components of a computer (e.g., motherboard, processor, memory, hard drive).

Malware – Malicious software designed to harm or exploit a computer, including viruses, spyware, and ransomware.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – A security method requiring multiple verification steps (e.g., password + phone code, and passcode device) to access an account. Banks often enforce username-password login, with 2FA, but also require a one-time passcode from a digital device, like a USB stick or keypad they provide.

Operating System (OS) – The software that manages a computer’s hardware and software (e.g., Windows, macOS, Linux).

Password Manager – A tool that securely stores and generates strong passwords for different accounts.

Phishing – A cyberattack where hackers send fake emails or messages to trick users into revealing sensitive information.

PIN (Personal Identification Number) – A short numeric code used for security (e.g., banking or unlocking devices).

Pretexting – Creating a fabricated scenario (e.g., pretending to be IT support) to trick a victim into providing information.

Public Wi-Fi – Wireless internet networks in public places (e.g., cafes, airports, hotels) that can be insecure.

Ransomware – A type of malware that locks or encrypts a user’s files and demands payment to restore access.

Router/Modem – A hardware device that connects a local network (home or office) to the internet.

Scareware – Displaying fake security alerts to trick users into downloading malicious software.

Social engineering – We used to call this a con, or confidence trick. It’s a manipulation technique that exploits human psychology to trick people into revealing confidential information or taking harmful actions.

Software – Programs and operating systems that run on a computer.

Spam – Unwanted or unsolicited messages, usually advertising or scams, often sent in bulk via email.

Spyware – Malicious software that secretly gathers information about a user’s activities.

Tailgating (Piggybacking) – Physically following an authorized person into a secure area without proper credentials.

Two-factor Authentication (2FA) – A security feature that requires two forms of verification before logging in (e.g., password + SMS code).

Virtual Private Network (VPN) – A service that encrypts internet traffic and hides a user’s location to improve privacy and security.

Vulnerability – A weakness in software or hardware that can be exploited by attackers.

Windows Defender – Microsoft’s built-in security tool that protects against viruses and malware.

Wi-Fi – A wireless network that allows devices to connect to the internet.

Butterflies of 2025

It seemed like a slow start to the year. Usually expect to see some of the emerging hibernators and over-winterers in later February. However, my first UK butterfly of the year wasn’t until 5th March, a Brimstone. My first Orange Tip last year was 17th March, and apparently it was the first UK record for 2024. I will update this article as the year progresses and the butterflies appear. UPDATE: It turned cold after writing this, not seen another butterfly since 9th.

Brimstone – 5th March, Cottenham

Comma x3 – 8th March, Cottenham

Peacock x2, Small Tortoiseshell x1 – RSPB Ouse Washes – 9th March

Small/Large White – 31 March – Allotment

Green-veined White – 1st April – Les King Wood

Male Orange Tip – 3rd April – Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits

Footnote

We were in Tenerife in early February, we saw several butterfly species: Monarch, Canarian Cleopatra (F), Small Tortoiseshell, Large White, Red Admiral

Amphibian timeline – Operation PondLife

UPDATE: Larval hatchlings by 20th March or thereabouts, and gills and mouth obvious in the tadpoles just under a week later.

Reluctantly, but for safety reasons, I drained and filled our old pond in March 1998 and relocated dozens and dozens of frogs. Luckily, some of the neighbours at the time had ponds. We’d had spawn that year and that was also sent to a friend’s pond elsewhere in the village, hopefully without transferring any problems. It’s generally not advisable to move anything from one pond to another as there are invasive species and pathogens that might be transferred, but I didn’t really know about ponds back in 1998!

2025's first frogspawn — The first frogspawn of 2025, 6th March

In the years after, we’d have an occasional frog in the garden, usually in a wet patch behind the water butts, but sometimes hopping about the garden on sultry summer nights.

I redug the pond in May 2019. Hooray! I made it just half the original water surface area and it was not quite as deep as the old pond. However, I made sure it had terracing within and double lined it. I planted some native aquatic plants. We saw numerous frogs in lockdown year 2020 and the two species of snail present thrived. I did several music sessions live on Facebook as #PondWatch that spring and summer with thousands of listeners at the peak!

The pond attracted and continues to attract several damselflies and dragonflies. The birds seem to use it actively too. Oh, Mrs Sciencebase has witnessed Grey Herons taking frogs from the pond on at least a couple of occasions.

Herpetologist friend tells me that it is possible to have newts and frogs in the same pond. Indeed, this is obvious when it comes to data from another friend’s pond. I had been warned that newts would eat frogspawn, but seemingly it’s more likely that the frogs would predate the newts.

I’ve kept a record of the first appearance of frogspawn each year: 5th March 2021, 21st February 2022, 11th March 2023, 22nd February 2024, 6th March 2025.

Also of note in the summer of 2024 we had our first sighting of a couple of newts in the garden, on the patio on different wet nights, if memory serves.

Voles among us

Voles are rodents related to lemmings and hamsters, but are generally stouter of body and have a longer, hairy tail, smaller ears too. They are sometimes known as meadow mice or field mice. Etymologically speaking, they were generically “field mice”, vole from Old Norse völlr, and related to wold/weald as parts of English place names.

Vole, at the water's edge, Earith car park, RSPB Ouse Fen — Bank Vole, at the water’s edge, Earith car park, RSPB Ouse Fen

Here, we have three species of what we call voles:

Microtus agrestis – the Field, or Short-tailed, Vole, there are an estimated 75 million

Myodes glareolus – the Bank Vole, estimated, 25 million

Arvicola amphibius – European Water Vole, sometimes incorrectly known as the water rat, it is not a rat, despite being called Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. Endangered species. Estimated 100000 individuals.

And, of course, there’s Microtus arvalis – Common Vole, present as a sub-species on Orkney (M. a. orcadensis) and in the Channel Islands, but not in England or Wales.

Distinguishing between the Water Vole and the three meadow voles is relatively easy. Separating Bank from Field is harder unless you can see the tail. The tail of the Field Vole is about 30% the length of its body, whereas that Bank Vole’s tail is much longer, about 50% the length of its body. If you can’t see the tail, there are other indicators, although none seem perfect.

The Bank Vole has a warmer, more rusty, colouration compared to the grey-brown of the Field Vole. The fur of the Field Vole is not quite so smooth and neat as that of the Bank Vole and also largely covers ears and nose, less so in Field Vole. All such indicators can be confused in the field especially when there are variants such as lighter, gingery Field Voles.

Habitat is not a good indicator either, as Field and Bank may well favour similar habitat despite their names. As with many vernacular species names, they can be spurious and based on folklore, pre-scientific observations, and whimsy.

I asked friends on BlueSky to weigh in on the photo above. Terry O’Connor sided with Bank Vole, which was my first thought on seeing it yesterday: “Chestnut with grey underfur looks right and its ears are on the big side for Field Vole.”

One of my biggest missed opportunities photographically speaking was to capture a shot of a Grey Heron gulping down a Water Vole while standing on the roadside verge along a local road bridge over one of our lodes.

I did get photos of a Bank Vole that was swimming across the river in front of the Earith car park at RSPB Ouse Fen. It was my definitely-amateur, but professional-seeming, togger friend Andy who first spotted it. It seemed to disappear at the water’s edge, but I spotted it again, sitting stock still in the water and we both got a few snapshots.

ISO redux

There was almost no photographic light left in the sky after sunet last night, but a Barn Owl flew past and I really just had to grab a shot even though I was just about to head home. My Canon R7 set to auto-ISO jumped to 20000, which is very high so the photo was very noisy/grainy. I usually denoise my images with DxO PureRaw 4 and for this one it had to be done. PureRaw drops the ISO by about three stops, so that’s as if the camera had been shooting at ISO 2500.

Low-light Barn Owl in flight — Barn Owl, image denoised with DxO PureRaw 4 and then gently edited in PaintShopPro

For those interested in such things, ISO ain’t what it used to be as I mentioned before. For film cameras, ISO was a measure of the sensitivity of the film. You used to use a higher ISO if you were shooting in lower light conditions.

For a digital camera, there’s no way to change the sensitivity of the sensor. So, adjusting the ISO does nothing more than turn up the brightness of the image you’ve captured and this brightness control is then embedded into the photo you download from the camera.

At lower light levels, your camera needs to turn up the brightness for the same shutter speed and aperture (f-stop) to get the exposure level you want. This means the noise is turned up brighter too, commonly seen as a purple speckles throughout the darker areas of the photo, but also impinging to different degrees across the whole image.

Now, the noise in a film photo is often referred to as grain (because it’s associated with the grain size of the particles of light-sensitive silver compounds in the film itself) It’s often seen as moody, romantic, and evocative, especially in noir Hollywood photos or the celebrity portrait work of David Bailey etc et cetera. It can be pleasing, just like the crackles and pops of classic vinyl…ish.

But, for digital photos, noise is just noise. It’s not grain, it’s not really romantic, nor evocative, it detracts and distorts the detail in your photo. So anything you can do to keep the ISO as low as possible and any processing that removes the noise without removing detail is, to my eye, a good thing. There are limits, but as regular viewers will know I almost always use DxO PureRaw to do the basic pre-edit processing of my photos. It essentially turns down the digital ISO control by three “stops” but without lowering the brightness.

The Barn Owl was shot at ISO 20000, so DxO is effectively bringing that down to ISO 2500, which is still way too high for a clean photo. But, it beats the RAW image straight out of the camera.

Incidentally, all this pre-processing and processing, is basically the digital equivalent of developing the film and printing from the negative as you would do with film. Some people imagine it’s somehow cheating because there are a lot more options allowing you to adjust levels and other stuff when you process digital negatives (the camera RAW) file, but it’s worth looking at the history of film photography to see how that nothing has changed fundamentally. Photography is not reality, it has always been about capturing a moment in time and developing it in such a way as to make that moment special after the event.

Barn Owl in flight pre-PSP — This is the Barn Owl as it looked after processing the RAW file with DxO but prior to adjust levels with PSP

This is the Barn Owl as it looked before processing the RAW file with DxO

Barn Owl before and after DxO and PSP processing

Lost Tomorrows – a song

We overheard an older gent singing in the chapel in Los Gigantes (pictured on the artwork) on our February 2025 trip to Tenerife. He had a lovely voice, it was very moving, we stayed out of the chapel, not wishing to intrude. I said hola to him as he emerged and complimented him on his singing voice. He responded with a tear in his eye and told us that he had been singing to his wife in Heaven. It touched us. I had to write a song – Lost Tomorrows.

Some of the lyrics I put together while we were still in the Canaries, but I had no idea what they’d become until I got home. There was originally a line about the land of the giants, Los Gigantes, but that sounded a little incongruous so I changed that to the reference about mantras. The desert was a reference to the Sahara, the pilots the whales and the captains of the boats.

The Milkweed Queen, the Monarch butterfly

The milkweed queen is the monarch butterfly of which I saw only one on the trip. The pressure that brings the bends was an allusion to how deep the ocean is between Tenerife and its neighbouring island of La Gomera. Our denying the English winter was what we’d planned to do as a birthday treat, although it was soured by us both being ill. The tide that never turns was the title of an older song of mine that emerged from a trip to Malta’s Twin Cities many years ago.

I did all the vocals, Taylor and Martin acoustic guitar parts, and recorded the strings, cello, and mute trumpet as MIDIS sounds using an Akai keyboard.

<a href="https://davebradley.bandcamp.com/album/the-after-words-ep">The After Words EP by Dave Bradley</a>

The song is in three sections. The first (Part 1 – Lost Tomorrows) is a conventional singer-songwriter tune, which features my Taylor six-string acoustic guitar and begins with the sound of a Canary Island Chiff Chaff. That main ends at about 4’07”.

The second section (Part 2- Forever Girl) is a little different. I’d recorded a demo of the song on my phone, playing my Martin acoustic. It was very rough, but with a bit of tweaking I pulled together a lo-fi loop of the original arpeggiated intro. This section features the sound of the rolling Atlantic Ocean. I then played several keyboard parts assigned to cello, mute trumpet, and string section sounds.

At about 6’53”, section 2 intersects with the third section (Part 3 – Ubi Caritas.), which is snippet of a choral piece I attempted using some of the words from Ubi Caritas. The original text is attributed to Paulinus of Aquileia in 796 CE, so well out of copyright.

“Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor”

I added a lot of cathedral-scale reverb to this choral tailpiece as well as EQing the vocals to make them seem distant. It was meant to be a direct allusion to the old gent singing in the chapel, although he had a much sweeter voice in that setting and was solo a capella. The choral section fades in and out with the sound of an Atlantic Canary singing and, once more, those Atlantic rollers.

Intriguingly, the old man singing in the chapel was dressed largely in yellow with yellow trainers…almost a visual allusion to the local wild canaries. I wish we’d been able to have a longer chat with him, perhaps have a coffee together.

Los Gigantes as seen from the place we were staying in Los Gigantes

The line from Ubi Caritas translates from the Latin as: Where charity and love are, God is there. The love of Christ has gathered us together into one. If you’re into that sort of thing.

ISO is not ISO when it comes to digital photography

When you first learn about photography, you’re taught about the exposure triangle – shutter speed, aperture, and the ISO sensitivity of the film. Back in the day, you’d choose your film sensitivity to suit the light levels under which you’d expect to shoot. You then play aperture against shutter speed to balance the exposure of the image. You might then opt for smaller apertures (bigger f number) for longer depth of field means you need a longer shutter speed. Choosing a short shutter speed to freeze action would conversely mean you needed a bigger aperture to capture sufficient light.

In digital photography, the concept of ISO has changed. With a digital camera, you can have a different ISO for every frame you shoot if you like and so you have more options about balancing aperture and shutter speed for artistic purposes. However, it is important to note that while a different ISO value really meant a different light sensitivity of the film, you cannot change the sensitivity of a digital camera’s sensor. So, changing ISO is not changing anything physically as it would be with film.

Rather, changing ISO in a digital camera affects how the signal from the sensor is processed by the camera’s software. When you increase the ISO in a digital camera, the sensor’s raw signal is amplified. This means the image becomes brighter. The change in ISO is more akin to turning up the volume control on your stereo or headphones. And, as with a stereo turned up too loud you get distortion. For a digital image that distortion is, ironically, known as noise (random specks of colour in the image). Noise is more noticeable at higher ISO settings and in the darker areas of an image, which is why many photographers try to keep their ISO as low as possible.

The high-ISO noise effect is worse the smaller the sensor, so full-frame digital cameras tend not to be as “noisy” as cropped sensors and cameras with even smaller sensors, such as superzooms.

Of course, there are tools such as DxO’s PureRaw, Lightroom, Topaz Denoise, etc that allow you to remove the noise to some degree without distorting the image. Some work better than others, for me, PureRaw 4 seems to give me the best results.

Vegetative electron microscopy

When I was a chemistry student, a friend on the engineering course always struggled to reach the prescribed word count for his essays, so he and I would sit in his room, have a few beers, and generate word salad. We’d turn his simple and dull prose (if you could even call it that) into the most overblown and hyperbolic drivel, just to pad out his essays so he could submit them. It took him five years, instead of three, to complete his degree. I think he got a third, in the end. Went off to South East Asia to fix boilers on ships…

Anyway, in the age of machine reading and machine learning, my skill in generating artificial intelligence for him is perhaps redundant. Anyone can prompt an LLM, large language model, to produce drivel by the shipload. And, it seems, more and more academics are doing just that. Feeding their hypotheses into machines, cranking the handle, and generating content they then submit to predatory or naive journals for publication.

Discontent, more like.

The trouble with using machines to write and not having someone to hand with the skills to check what has been generated, to remove the nonsense phrases and the AI hallucinations, is that lots of journals are filling up with drivel. Retraction Watch landed on a meaningless, but scientific-sounding, phrase that seems to have been used countless times in papers over the last few years. Vegetative electron microscopy!

According to RW, the phrase seems to have come from a 1959 paper that has been assimilated into a database using an errant optical character recognition (OCR) system, one that didn’t take into account the separate text columns in the old paper. So where in the left-hand column there was the phrase “vegetative cell”, the word vegetative was at the end of a line in the column, and the phrase “electron microscopy” was adjacent to it in the right-hand column.

The image shows a screengrab of the 1959 paper about vegetative cells and the electron microscopy used to research them. I've highlighted where the problem phrase would've emerged if OCR failed to note the gap between columns. — The image shows a screengrab of the 1959 paper about vegetative cells and the electron microscopy used to research them. I’ve highlighted where the problem phrase would’ve emerged if OCR failed to note the gap between columns.

A human reader would not have made that mistake.

Now, that phrase seems to be turning up in research papers. They can’t have been written and checked by any real scientists and not by any referee or editor, surely? The research literature is becoming heavily polluted with paper-mill dross.

Ultimately, our student shenanigans did not matter to the wider world. But, in a world where scientific endeavour is being derailed by moronic politicians and their henchmen, we need a stronger science base, not one polluted with such nonsense as vegetative electron microscopy. It leads to distrust in scientists and in science, it gives those who peddle pseudoscience, disinformation, misinformation, and fake, greater leverage to shake off the facts and replace them with ill-informed, politically-driven opinion. They can call out this fakery and tell the public that they can no longer trust science.

Science relies on a solid scientific literature. Given how much publishers charge for their “editorial services” and their finished products, is it too much to ask that they actually do some editing, and edit out this kind of drivel? Apparently, some papers that had this ludicrous phrase have been retracted, others have been deemed fine by the publishers (who obviously really couldn’t care less as long as they get their money), others have had corrections published.

The presence of this fingerprint phrase is not an accident, it’s not a typo, it shows that the paper was faked. Even if the authors were simply copy-and-pasting boilerplate content that contained the fingerprint (and there are others), then that would be plagiarism, wouldn’t it? But, what is obvious is that nobody bothered reading the text before submission to a journal and nobody on the editorial team nor among their referees read it either and so these dodgy papers are sitting in the literature like so much sawdust in a dodgy loaf of bread.

Egrets, I’ve seen a few

In the 1990s, East Anglian birders seeing this species locally might have noted it as a mega because it was so rarely seen in the UK, but as with the Little Egret, and more recently the Great White Egret, this ostensibly African species, the Cattle Egret, has spread its wings and found a home here. There are other species, such as Glossy Ibis, that are doing the same to a lesser degree, but may well become as common as those African egrets, given time.

Fluffed up Cattle Egret in a field behind a horse

The latter frequents muddy fields inhabited by hooved mammals, the other two the waterways and flooded gravel pits. Part of their spread is down to habitat formation over here but also the shifts in climate that mean they found conditions acceptable as they extended their range northwards out of Africa and then the Mediterranean region.

The Cattle Egret is the archetypal avian shytkicker, it follows cattle, horses, and sheep as they munch their way around fields and picks off the invertebrate life disturbed by the hooves; just as they would’ve done among the wildebeest and zebra in their homeland. They will also eat mice and frogs given the chance. They’re often quite grubby given they’re usually pecking about the mud of livestock farms and paddocks, but as they come into mating plumage they take on some lovely peachy feather shades within their brilliant white plumage.

Two fluffed up Cattle Egret in a field behind a horse

Great White Egret has taken advantage of the crayfish in the lakes of Northern France. Having range extended to there several years ago, it’s not a big hop across La Manche to reach the Somerset Levels or East Anglian gravel pits.

Cattle Egrets bred in Somerset in 2008, according to the BTO website, with two pairs nesting there. There have been numerous breeding attempts since and the species is slowly expanding in southern Britain. The BTO statistics seem rather out of date, suggesting just 66 wintering birds in the UK. But, there were reports of a couple of hundred on the Somerset Levels and we have seen groups of a couple of dozen in the nearby village of Swavesey. Others report 30-40 in that same village and in and around Fen Drayton Lakes and other local areas. I hope the BTO will be updated soon. Certainly, BirdGuides no longer considers a Cattle Egret sighting as a mega these days.