Author: David Bradley

Birds on the Isles of Scilly

There are lots of birds in the Isles of Scilly, although unfortunately, we were at the tail-end of the Puffin season. The islands had had good weather and Easterly winds for a while, which meant less marine bird activity and lower numbers. We saw Manx Shearwaters by the handful as opposed to flocks of 1500-2000 on pelagic trips the week before. Lots of Gannet meant dolphins: Bottlenosed and Common Dolphins on a couple of trips, and lots of seals on another. Oh, and a lone Red Squirrel, just to give the mammals a mention. We also saw six Blue Sharks being caught on our pelagic trip, measured, and scientifically tagged to be returned to the sea a little shaken but otherwise unharmed.

But, on the plus side, it meant no rain, blue skies and warm, sunny days. It was like being in The Caribbean.

We also added a few new species to the bird gallery on this trip: Manx Shearwater, Greenshank, Rock Pipit, Carrion Crow. Various juveniles: Dunnock, Linnet, Lapwing, Barn Swallow, and others. And, of course quite a few we had seen and photographed before, but in new locations: Puffin, Guillemot, Fulmar, Razorbill, Gannet, Great Black-backed Gull, Herring Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Shelduck, Oystercatcher, Swallows, Wren, Reed Warbler, Stone Chat, Meadow Pipit, Peregrine. There were more House Sparrow here than anywhere we have ever visited but only the occasional Chaffinch, Greenfinch, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Song Thrush, Blackbird, Collared Dove, and other fairly common town and country birds.

Interestingly, someone told us on our island-hopping travels that Robins are rarely seen on the IoS, we saw at least four. Black-headed Gulls only rarely made an appearance. Birds we did NOT see at all that we normally see everywhere else in the UK: Buzzard, Kestrel, Jackdaw, Rook, Wood Pigeon, etc.

Our full IoS gallery of Birds, Boats, Mammals, and More is on Flickr and includes photos from Mr & Mrs Sciencebase. There’s also a bird-specific gallery on my Facebook, which should be visible to all visitors.

Great Tit vs Greenfinch

I bought a sack of black sunflower hearts to restock the garden bird feeders instead of that wasteful mixed seed most of which the small birds discard and the Woodpigeons and our labrador hoover up. It seems the Great Tit (Parus major) and the Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) are quite partial to these. They need some degree of patience to eat them given that the tasty seed is contained within an edible husk. This deters some less patient birds. I’ve not seen Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) tucking into these seeds on the feeders, for instance. They much prefer to snaffle suet balls and mixed dehusked seed mix.

Eating such seeds comes with the risk of greater exposure to predator threat while the bird cracks the seed open. The Great Tits seem to quickly duck in and out, grabbing a seed and then darting back into the foliage to presumably break it open and eat it. A female Greenfinch (Chloris chloris) didn’t seem perturbed, standing her ground (well, her perch) while she opened it to eat.

Bird life in North Norfolk

A few snaps from a recent, short, but sweet, and hot, camping trip to North Norfolk. Several Turtle Doves, one Cuckoo, lots of Whitethroat, Linnets, Swallows, Swifts, House Martins, several Sedge Warblers, Pied Wagtail, Wren, Common Tern, Dunlin, Knot, the usual gulls (Lesser Black-backed, Black-headed), Mallards, Moorhens, Coots, Avocet, Shelduck, Skylark, Kestrel, Greenfinch, Goldfinch, various geese (Canada, Egyptian, Greylag), Black-tailed Godwit (just one, overhead), and nesting Common Ringed Plover and Oystercatchers.

Common Ringed Plover Sedge Warbler “singing” Juvenile Coot stepping out

Turtle Dover turring up the Wi-Fi
Mallard making a run for it

Last Cuckoo of the Snettisham Summer?

Oystercatcher

Knot

Whitethroat

Avocet

Turtle Dove in a tree

Sunset on Snettisham Beach

Dashed to the coast late on Saturday afternoon armed with a bag of Jelly Babies and a hefty stash of tent pegs. Evening dog walk was accompanied by the turring of Turtle Doves on and off the campsite, off-shore wind turbines, a fish supper and watching the sun set on the East Coast with the wonderful Mrs Sciencebase. An astonishing thought in so many ways for one grew up on the coast far north of The Wash.

Switch off the mind and let the heart decide…

Making tracks

Any way the wind blows
Breaker, breaker, do ya copy?

The seventh first and only seal
Groyne injury

Live for the groove…

Springwatch in your back garden

UPDATE: April 2022 A Chiffchaff is currently using the pond. Our full garden ticklist can be found in a more recent article about garden birdwatching here.

UPDATE: Mid-January 2019, we’d been away and the house next door was temporarily empty. We got out of the car, there’s a Goldcrest tweeting away from a bush adjacent to the front garden fence. A first for our garden.

It’s like SpringWatch in our garden sometimes…full birding list for garden can be found here.

Non-avian vertebrates: Common frog, squirrel (grey and black), hedgehog, “pipistrelle” bat, cat, dog.

Apologies if I didn’t tag everyone…

Bird photos here: https://imagingstorm.co.uk/british-birds

A vagrant in our midst – Great Reed Warbler

UPDATE: Lee Evans (not that one) told me via the UK Bird ID Facebook group that it is likely this is the same GRW that has been sighted a few times over the last few years. According to CamBirds blog there was one at Paxton Pits in 2016, one at Eldernell (RSPB Nene Washes) in 2014. Life expectancy for this species is 1-5 years. So it could be the same male.

If you’re a birder in or around Cambridge, you will know via CamBirds, social media, word-of-mouth and other information routes that there is a vagrant in our midst. He’s been here since about the 15th June and is still posturing and shouting just outside the village of Fen Drayton. We have to assume he’s lost, as he is usually only to be found on mainland Europe and Asia and spends his winters swanning around sub-Saharan Africa. That said, climate change, changes in farming practices, and other environmental concerns are already disrupting bird behaviour, so who knows?

He is a Great Reed Warbler and has been showing well on the southern edge reed beds of Elney Lake at RSPB Fen Drayton.

Acrocephalus arundinaceus to give him his scientific name is the biggest of the diffuse group of birds we call the European warblers. His calling and posturing for a mate are most likely to be entirely in vain as it is very unlikely that a female will have accidentally ended up here too. Anyway, his presence is cause for celebration among local birders who have been out in force since mid-June to catch a glimpse of him and to hear his syrinx in action.

I got some distant shots of him through the summer haze, but it was too warm for that kind of zoom photography. Still, it’s a record shot. Much better is the shot I got of a few of the birders standing patiently gazing through scopes and bins.

Mother bitterns dance chick to chick

I ended up wending my way to the Reedbed Trail at RSPB Ouse Fen again (Over side, as opposed to Needingworth). There were several birders there, monitoring Bittern behaviour and while I was speaking to fellow Geordie ex-pat Dave we saw four taking flight briefly from the reeds. He’d seen at least 7 already in the four hours he’d been watching. His dedication to the cause was echoed in his car registration which (almost) spelt out Bittern. Apparently, they were watching for females dancing chick-to-chick in the reeds as their offspring wander off and the mother attends to each one.

I, on the other hand, had a dog to walk, cattle to avoid and Marsh Harriers to photograph. There were Bearded Tits around making their unmistakable “pew pew” sound in one patch of reeds, but I didn’t see them, sadly. Still, lots of Marsh Harrier around, a couple of Kestrel and Buzzard, Goldfinch, Black-headed Gull, no Common Tern on this visit, Reed Warbler calling and darting about the reeds. A few Reed Bunt and an occasional Whitethroat. A flock of four Little Egret, and the usual Jackdaws, Rooks, Pigeons, Greylag Geese etc.

The Bittern photos didn’t come out well, the one above I snapped at RSPB Minsmere, so here’s a Kestrel instead.

What is diamorphine?

Diamorphine is another name for heroin.

Chemical structure of heroin

(5a,6a)-7,8-didehydro-4,5-epoxy-17-methylmorphinan-3,6-diol diacetate.

Other synonyms diacetylmorphine, morphine diacetate, street names: H, smack, junk, horse, and brown.

Diamorphine is made by the chemical acetylation of morphine, which is derived from natural opium sources. The word morphine was coined by German apothecary Friedrich Sertürner around 1816 alluding to Morpheus Ovid’s name for the god of dreams (origin Greek “morphe” meaning form, shape, beauty. The word heroin was also coined in Germany, in 1898, as trademark for the morphine substitute invented by Friedrich Bayer & Co.

From Fen Bridge Farm to Archie’s Way

There are lots of Common Whitethroat (Sylvia communis) on the margins of farmland around Cottenham. I walked the dog along Broad Lane from Fen Bridge Farm to Archie’s Way and a little beyond (hoping to see or hear something rare). But, there was an abundance of Whitethroat, I had only seen one or two so far this year, but today at least a dozen, also Reed Bunting, Yellowhammer, Corn Bunting, Linnet. Also, lots of Reed Warblers in our local reed bed.

If you’re wondering what this warbler sounds like, have a listen to it on Xeno-Canto. What’s a warbler anyway?

As they pointed out on BBC Springwatch, the Reed Bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus) used to be seen only on or close to reed beds, but it has now spread its wings, taken a flight of fancy and is now quite common on farmland and even in country gardens. Walk along the Cottenham Lode or anywhere out on the Fen Edge Patch and beyond, where there are drainage ditches and listen out for its trilly call and you might spot one perched on a tall weed in a field of wheat or on the reeds.

Lots of Linnet (Linaria cannabina) around the farmland surrounding Cottenham right now too. Mentioned them last year in a blog post about RSPB North Warren. Here’s a female out on the fen today with a mouthful of berries. Female pictured below, but you can listen to the sound of the male here.

As well as the Reed Bunts, Linnets, and Whitethroats, mentioned earlier, there are also lots of Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella) and Corn Bunting (E. calandra) around the Cottenham Fen Edge at the moment.

A couple of Corn Buntings perched on overhead wires allowed me to get fairly close to photograph them before flying off into the wheat fields.

Slightly overexposed poppies along Broad Lane, Cottenham

Cow parlsey along Broad Lane, Cottenham.

Photographing Saturn’s rings

TL:DR – My sorry attempts at photographing Saturn and Jupiter in 2018.

I love the late light of midsummer, the long, drawn out sunsets, the dying embers as our star ducks below the horizon, the afterglow, the gradual emergence of the stars and planets. Jupiter and Venus in opposite skies last night. Venus lamenting the Sun’s demise and hugging the sun North Western sky as we approach the solstice. Jupiter higher and dominant in the South. The asterisms we know as the Northern Cross and The Plough way above.

I was pondering life, the universe, and everything when it occurred to me that there was no moon last night. So, I grabbed my Canon dSLR and Sigma 150-600mm zoom lens in the hopes of snatching a glimpse of Jupiter’s moons, the four Galilean moons to be specific.  I’ve tried before with this camera setup and got something bearable, but although I could see Jupiter was very much not simply a stellar pinprick in the frame, the moons did not show up in this frame.

Perhaps, they’re eclipsed right now, hiding behind their giant gaseous parent, or maybe it was more about camera settings. It was too late in the evening after a day with a heavy workload to hunker down with tripod and remote shutter to get a longer exposure. Anyway, here’s a crop of the best of a handful of Jovial shots.

In the above shot, you can just about see the striations that band Jupiter, although you obviously cannot discern its Red Spot (which apparently has shrunk in size since I first read a stars and planets book as a child in the early 1970s). Settings were: Handheld with two-stop image stabilisation, full-frame camera, 600mm zoom, f/5.6, t 1/1500s, ISO 12800.

The shot was good enough to inspire me to turn my attention to Saturn, but I needed to find it in the night sky first. A quick look at a sky map revealed it was above the horizon in the Southern sky some way East of Jupiter and much lower. Spotted from “down the street”, a fairly orangey, diffuse-looking star. I didn’t feel like setting up the tripod (moreover the street lamps were going to spoil the view with their brightness, anyway. I didn’t have high hopes. I used the same camera settings, and was really surprised with what came out of the camera. Obviously, the photo is cropped, but you can clearly see Saturn’s rings in this shot.

I posted this photo to some acclaim on Facebook a few moments after snapping it and one commenter suggested they might buy a similar 600mm lens. I should point out that there’s a Tamron equivalent of the Sigma I use. Reviews say it is marginally better. That said, if you calibrate the Sigma to your specific camera you can adjust back/foreward focusing and improve clarity somewhat, I discussed this on the blog last year; you should calibrate all your lenses to your camera(s). If you don’t want to go to the expense of a full-blown astro kit (telescope and dSLR adapter), I reckon it would be worth buying the associated 1.4x multiplier for the Sigma or Tamron.