Author: David Bradley

UPDATE: Report of cuckoo in Cottenham, at Fen Drayton, and at Paxton Pits last day or two.

Cuckoos tracked by the BTO have returned to Old Blighty, a couple of days later than last year.

Mrs Sciencebase and I have seen several of the UK’s regular summer visitors during the last couple of weeks (Blackcaps, Martins [Sand and House], Swallow, Willow Warbler etc) but we have not heard nor seen any Cuckoos this year yet.

Listen out for this brood parasite with its unmistakeable call. We saw and photographed two males in May 2017. The mostly grey-coloured bird looks a bit hawkish but a lot smaller than most raptors. Also comes in a rufous coloured variety (caught sight of a rufous cuckoo on the North Norfolk coast in the summer of 2017.

Druridge Bay is a pristine stretch of golden sand in Northumberland nestled between the settlements of Cresswell at its south end and Amble to the north. Commonly, there are plenty of seabirds around, various gulls, Sanderlings, Dunlin, Oystercatcher, Cormorants and more. Among the dunes, you will see and hear Meadow Pipit, Reed Bunting, Skylark and more. But, head ever so slightly inland across the dunes and the main road and you will reach a watery wildlife reserve that was once an open-cast mine where there is now an abundance of waterfowl: Curlew, Black-tailed Godwit, Redshank, Lapwing, Grey Heron, Shoveler, Mallard, Avocet, and many others. On our visit (14th April 2018), there was also Ruff, Pintail, Red-breasted Merganser, and various others.

Hunting Heron (Ardea cinerea)

Red-breasted Merganser (f) splashing about (Mergus serrator)

Red-breasted Merganser pair

Ruff preening (Calidris pugnax)

Crowd of Curlew (Numenius arquata)

Black-tailed Godwit take fright and flight (Limosa limosa)

Bedraggled female Linnet (Carduelis cannabina); male Stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) behind

Skylark showing his crest well near Cresswell (Alauda arvensis)

When I was about 10 or 11 years old, I went with friends and their family to a free music festival at Druridge Bay in Northumberland. The event was organised as a protest against plans to build a nuclear power station at this site. 40+ years later, there is still just miles and miles of golden sands, dunlin and dunes, and crashing waves and over the road behind the shore a glorious nature reserve full of Black-tailed Godwit, Curlew, Redshank, Merganser, Pintail, Ruff, and countless other birds.

Druridge Defences

Barbed Comment

Beach caster

Give my love to the waves

Sanderling

Having already come unstuck in identifying a Redpoll that alighted on our nijer seed feeder within minutes of my hanging the feeder in our beech tree, I’ve now found another issue with this type of bird. It’s not necessarily well known that the Lesser Redpoll and the Common (Mealy) Redpoll and the Hoary Redpoll are actually the same species and that there are also sub-species and hybrids that are genetically the same as each other. Referring to one as a specific type is thus something of a taxonomic faux pas these days based on the DNA. That said, genomics has found differences in gene expression but no genetic divergence, this would suggest that there might be different plumage forms that are fairly recent, but they come from a single interbreeding lineage and do not represent distinct species.

Anyway, I wrote a brief blog about Redpolls in February 2018 and have since seen Redpolls in flocks on several reserves, but none have shown again in our garden.

Most recently, I was photographing the nuthatches, tits, and finches on feeders in the kitchen garden of friends’ smallholding, when what looked like a pair of Redpolls arrived. Except, they didn’t have the familiar red cap. They looked like Redpolls but with a golden cap. My first thought was that they were perhaps juvenile Redpolls or some kind of genetic mutation.

One contact thought, at first glance, that they were Snow Buntings. But, another Jim Welford on the British Facebook Birders group, suggested that red is not a natural colouration in Redpolls and that they can convert carotenoids in their diet to a pigment, but if they lack the appropriate carotenoids or are ill when their moult is underway, the red colouration will be absent or another colour will show. It also seems to be something that can happen with Linnets (Carduelis cannabina) which are also famously flushed red on their breast. Welford pointed me to a useful book by Tim Birkhead, The Red Canary, which apparently discusses the colouration issue.

Birder Andy Warr had this to say about the so-called Goldpoll some time ago:

First-winters and female Lesser, Mealy and Arctic Redpolls generally show a crimson cap, with varying degrees of brightness, though it is not uncommon for some to show orange, copper, yellow, even brownish caps, or any combination of the aforementioned.

Warr adds that a gold cap is quite regularly seen in first-winter birds and adult females.

It wasn’t the brightest of days to visit a nature reserve. In fact, it was grey and grim and pouring with rain. So, while the Pipits and Avocets were showing well, as were the Tree Sparrows and Stock Doves at the visitor centre feeders, we missed out on the Spoonbill that had been sighted. The wetlands of RSPB Saltholme is one of the foremost bird sanctuaries and observatory for migratory and wading birds in the UK. As you might guess from the name, it is was a source of salt for centuries and now sits nestled in the industrial area of Seaton Carew Rd, Stockton-on-Tees, near Middlesbrough (Grid ref NZ506231). It forms part of a wider site of special scientific interest called Seal Sands.

Commonly seen are Common Tern, Lapwing, Peregrine, Yellow Wagtail, Water Rail, none of which we saw on our visit, unfortunately.

Pictured above: Reedbeds in the shadow of the Tees Transporter Bridge. The bridge connects Middlesbrough, on the south bank, to Port Clarence, on the north bank. It is an unconventional bridge in that it has a travelling “gondola” suspended from the bridge, which can carry about 200 people and 9 cars across the river in 90 seconds.

Other birds that were not present included Rock Pipit and Water Pipit, but there were plenty of Meadow Pipits among the rocks and on the water’s edge

Avocets were showing well, sadly didn’t get a snap of anything in a beak other than water

There were a couple of Ringed Plover:

There were also cranes…but not the kind in which bird watchers are most interested.

Also visible from RSPB Saltholme even on a dull grey day is Temenos, a huge artwork by Anish Kapur, close to the Transporter, described as a 21st century landmark to honour region’s engineering and industrial heritage. Its name comes from the Greek “a piece of land assigned to a domain or dedicated to a god”. Looks more like a relativistic wormhole or a femidom:

Finally, back at the feeders, lots and lots of Tree Sparrows (not to be confused with the House Sparrows you’d most commonly see in your garden)

The Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus) a crested and plump, winter visitor from Scandinavia, smaller than a Starling, with a distinctive yellow tip to the tail and red sealing wax colouration to the ends of its wing tips, hence the name. They will leave colder climes and head south when food is in short supply, in fact its a lack of a decent berry crop in their home territories that drives them south. It seems that they most commonly end up being spotted in flocks in supermarket carparks that happen to be lined with berry-bearing trees. Presumably, they follow the motorways, perhaps harnessing ancient instincts that would have had them following valleys and rivers to find decent berry bushes.

In 2017, I saw a flock of 20 or so at the Cambridge Science Park near the Guided Busway but I was too slow to get a photo before they’d been spooked by dogwalkers and darted off down Milton Road and out of sight.

Winter 2017-2018, I’ve kept track of sightings via the WaxwingsUK twitter feed and attempted to catch up with the birds in a couple of places that Mrs Sciencebase and I happened to be visiting, North Norfolk and elsewhere, although we failed to see them.

A trip to the town of my alma mater (Newcastle) to visit our daughter who was also studying there at the time, brought us our first decent sighting. The WaxwingsUK feed mentioned that a bus stop opposite St Bartholomew’s Church in Long Benton, on the outskirts of the city had been hosting a small flock.

By the time we arrived, I’d got wind of just two still being around but we saw only one on three successive days passing the spot. Passersby almost all seemed to know what I was attempting to photograph and almost all of them had a tale of flocks of twitchers and birders and toggers in previous days! One or two people knew there was a bird of interest but didn’t know specifically what it was.

I don’t think there was a particularly large irruption of this species into the UK that winter, although sporadic sightings of small flocks were noted around Scotland, in Newcastle (Benton), Lincolnshire, North Norfolk, Suffolk, Southend in Essex, Kent, and elsewhere. There are usually lots of notes of them in Scotland. Indeed, it’s worth seeing what level of activity is reported from Shetland as this is the first place that might get an irruption if there has been the opposite of a mast year further north in terms of berries.

If someone refers to you as being “bird brained”, it’s usually to cast aspersions on your mental faculties…and yet modern science suggests the glove is on the other foot when it comes to who is the brightest of them all. To have a “bird brain”, suggests one is stupid, dim, of low IQ, perhaps a bit ditzy and absentminded too, the opposite may be true.

When we look at the mental faculties of the birds, in particular the crows (corvids) and parrots, we see cognitive skills way beyond what we imagine. For an organism that lacks the neocortex of mammals such as ourselves and the other apes we cannot yet understand how these birds can be so bright.

For years (HT Dr Kiki), it has been hinted at that some birds, the above classes, in particular, have cognition on a par with rats and small monkeys. But, seemingly (thank you Mark Changizi for the link), birds are much brighter than monkeys they have intellectual skills that bring them right up to ape level. Moreover, given that the real difference between humans and chimpanzees is really culture rather than cognition, that means the birds are close to our own intellect in many ways. For instance, they have the capacity to:

• Delay of gratification
• Mental time travel
• Reasoning
• Cooperation
• Mirror self-recognition
• Third-party intervention
• Problem solving
• Counting
• Tool use

There are many example and more. Indeed, Changizi is still reeling at the revelation: “Parrots and corvids are basically flying chimps,” he says in jocular mood, “There’s no better way to characterize their biology and ethology.”

Given that all birds descended from the theropod dinosaurs of which T rex was one (you thought they went extinct, didn’t you?), it’s worth remembering next time you accuse someone of being a bird brain that you never know who might be watching…