Birds – Page 32 – David Bradley

What birds might you see at RSPB Fen Drayton Lakes?

To me, it will always be Swavesey Lakes, but when the RSPB took on the old gravel pits that lie north of Fen Drayton, south of Holywell and west of Swavesey, they deemed a name change was in order, as I understand it.

The lakes, riverside, traditional meadows and hedges are linked by a network of paths and alongside is the Great River Ouse, which begins in Syresham in South NottsÂ winds its way throughÂ East Anglia to The Wash. It’s a lovely site, you’ll see vast starling murmations at dusk in the early autumn, but at this time of year it’s a flutter of activity from countless feathered friends.

We parked up at about 10 on the late May Bank Holiday Monday in 2017, and could immediately hear willow warbler, chiffchaff, great tit and a couple of distant cuckoo.

Overhead what I thought was probably aÂ marsh harrier or two, but actually realise now they were red kite. On the “board” promise of a bittern and oystercatchers with young. We saw a colony of greylag geese with goslings on the opposite bank of the River Great Ouse, but no other obvious bird young. The greylag’s had neighbours too: Egyptian geese.

On the pontoons that festoon some of the lakes there were plenty of black-headed gulls nesting and some common tern. On the outcrops into the lakes and the water’s edges: mallard, tufted duck,Â lapwing, mute swan, great crested grebe, redshank,Â cormorant, pochard,Â grey heron, and various others.

In and around the trees: blackcap, sedge warbler, long-tailed tit, robin, blackbird, wood pigeon, chaffinch, chiffchaff, goldfinch, collared dove. And, among the reeds, reed bunting, whitethroat, and reed warbler too. And a pair of nuthatch, based on a fleeting glimpse of two small birds with blue-grey colouring and rusty flanks and a monotonic and repetitive whistling.

Overhead Canada and greylag geese, mute swans, housemartins, barn swallows, and others.

Having heard the cuckoo there was always the hope of spotting one of these rapteurish-looking parasites, but we were not in luck.

I was also hoping to catch a shot at a yaffle or two (green woodpecker, in French: Picvert, “green pick”). As we drove off the site, there were lots of LBJs and we almost ran over a yaffle, which took to the air just in time. The female partridge on the opposite side of the road barely flinched and the female yellowhammer just flew.

I should point out that we were there in the middle of the day, a dawn or dusk visit would be much more fulfillingÂ given the dawn chorus or the twilight hunters and the birds coming home to roost, respectively.

Silent wings of the barn owl

Walking the dog at dusk out on the Cambridgeshire fens mid-May, lots of swallows around, meadow pipits, yellowhammers, the inevitable wood pigeons, collared doves, starlings and blackbirds, a few LBJs (little brown jobs), chaffinch, house martins, robins, (barely glimpsed, but certain) goldcrests and more. Heading along the lode thought I saw a little egret out of the corner of my eye, but turned to see a beautiful barn owl (Tyto alba) in the lowering sun circle the fields, hunting small mammals, worrying the skylarks on their nests.

The shot above was the first I captured, it’s often the way, first shot on the reel is the best, the most spontaneous, the one that’s just right, the subsequent photos are as the owl passes by and so mostly rear-end shots. He did bank around again and fly towards us a couple of times, taking no heed of our presence nor of the dog, and not even the sound of the camera’s shutter distracted from his time to pray. Here he is being defined in his nomenclature by the that most obvious of farm buildings, a barn.

He circled back around of the field on our side of the lode and we watched as he dived down, emerging from the long grass a few seconds later with a shrew in his talons before heading off in the direction of a patch of woodland (ironically close to where we’d parked the car).

It must be ten years since I last got a photograph of a barn owl. We’ve seen a few and certainly enjoyed watching one range alongside the car in the Yorkshire Wolds a couple of years ago, presumably hoping our wheels would disturb the roadside mammalia into scurrying.

Barn owls are well known as silent fliers. Their wings are huge compared to their body size and mass, they are also curved. Both characteristics are evolutionary adaptations to their hunting technique. They can move very slowly with barely a flap even in the lightest of updrafts almost hovering over prey they have sighted. But, it is the structure of the feathers which makes them much quieter than other raptors allowing them to hear prey without the background noise of their own wings.

The barn owl’s wing feathers are soft which smooths airflow, reducing noisy turbulence. In addition, the leading edge of their foremost wing feather (the 10th primary) is fluted appearing to have tiny barbs (that have tiny barbs upon them) that break up the airflow hitting the wing and again reduce noisy turbulence.

It might be that the flutings raise the frequency (pitch) of the sound above that audible to prey and perhaps the owl too. Indeed, the owl’s silence does mean that it can hear its prey in the groundcover whereas other noisier raptors need to rely almost entirely on their sight (viz, the kestrel hovering high above likely targets).

Nice BBC program showing pigeon, peregrine, and barn owl in flight. The sounds they do or don’t make and the turbulence their wings do or don’t generate. It’s worth noting that pigeon wing flaps are thought to be a communication device too. Peregrines stoop on their prey so quickly and aren’t flapping when they do so any noise the make in normal flight doesn’t matter. Also, Barn Owls keep quiet not so that their prey don’t hear them, but so that they can hear their prey and home in on the tiniest rustle of blades of grass or the twitching of a rodent whisker.

Great spotted fledgling

The Great Spotted Woodpecker chick (Dendrocopos major) I have been photographing these last few days is getting very bold and almost bouncing out of his tree house when the adults visit with food.

I am surprised that there is only one chick, maybe nest size limits how many eggs the female lays. Either way, this little fellow with his red crown (does that make him a male?) is clacking away requesting regular invertebrate meals from the male (with the red nape to his neck) and female (black and white, but for her rump). Mrs Sciencebase reckons the clacking of the adults from neighbouring trees is probably encouragement for the chick to fledge (we’ve not heard much calling from them). The chicks head seems at least as big as hisÂ mother’s, so presumably he is almost read to leave the confines of his woody abode.

Here are a few more shots of male and female attending to the needs of the chick. That beak is sharp, makes sense for Dad to close his eyes whileÂ passing grubs beak to beak.

Starling chick waiting to be fed

I’ve been walking past trees with lots of woodpecker holes recently and, as regular readers will know I’ve photographed the great spotted woodpeckers that are feeding chicks in the highest hole. Got some good shots of them flying in and out of the male with a load of grubs in its mouth ready to enter the nest.

It’s always feeding time in a bird’s nest whether that’s a hollow in a tree, a nest of twigs and feathers or a ground nest, which might be a simple depression on a sandbank or in a field.

Starling chicks (Sturnus vulgaris) are no different in their voracity for invertebrates. I was aware of parents flying in and out of a hole in a tree next to the woodpecker residence and caught sight of a chick poking its head above the proverbial parapet while its parent clacked and yacked on a nearby branch. It was only happy to fly in to nest to feed the chick(s) once I’d moved a few metres further away.

The common, or European, starling is a nosy bird with glossy black plumage that has something of a metallic sheen and shimmers with greens and puples in sunlight. It might also be speckled white at different times of the year. The legs are pink and the bill is black in winter and yellow in the summer.

Meanwhile, just been through my photos from Botswana, lots of birds, but no sight of a superb starling, which I remember being particularly fascinated by 25 years ago…just for the name alone.

The baby woodpecker’s divided red crown

Okay, here’s a question for evolutionary ornithologists…or basically anyone who knows the answer: Why do the chicks of great spotted woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major) have a bifurcated red crown? The mother’s head is completely black her red feathers being limited to the underside of her hind quarters (her so-called undertail coverts) , while the adult male has in addition a red patch on the nape of his neck.

I have photographed this family of D. major over the last few weeks coming and going at the nesting site in a tree near Rampton Pocket Park north of Cambridge, England. Saw the chick for the first time on the 20th May 2017.

The lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor) and the green woodpecker (Picus viridis) both have red caps. The green, also known as a yaffle, has red bars below the eyes emanating from the rear of the beak, otherwise mostly green/greenish yellow.

First sighting of a D. major this year in Rampton was end of February. This one is nesting at the Cottenham end of Rampton Spinney, I’ve seen a pair there since but not photographed those again. The nesting pair of great spotted woodpeckers I’ve photographed more recently are in a tree on the edge of Giant’s Hill.

Close to the sedge (warbler)

UPDATE: Have a listen to this bird’s “song” via Xeno Canto here. The sound recording was made at Fen Drayton where there are several Sedge Warbles making a racket right now at the Guided Busway crossing to Swavesey Lake.

We often take a walk through RSPB North Warren, the bird and nature reserve immediately north of the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh. There is a fresh water marsh there with quite an array of little egrets, duck, geese and on a recent visit a pair of spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia). Heading from the hide nearest Maggi Hambling’s infamous sculpture Scallop to the hide opposite at dusk recently, we heard a loud warbling song and then spotted a tiny little bird, white eyeband, flitty flight in and out of a tangle of thorny bushes. He sat still and not too far away for me to get a few nice shots of him. It was, I believe, a sedge warbler (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus).

The RSPB website describes this species as “quite plump”, but to my eye it was a rather delicate bird with prominent creamy “eyebrows”. The sedge is a summer visitor to the UK and elsewhere, choosing to spend its winters in sub-Saharan Africa. It commonly picks insects from vegetation while perched or sometimes hovering, which we observed, but there was also a lot of “leap-catching”, in which the bird grabs flying insects as it flies between perches.

Black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus)

Black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) are everywhere, lots of nesting birds at RSPB Minsmere. In fact, some observers suggest that the presence of so many this year at the reserve might be the underyling reason why the diversity of wetland/wading birds there is so low this year. There were, however, shovellers, avocets, Mediterranean gulls, common gulls, black-tailed godwits, common terns, little terns, and several other species spotted on the day we visited.

Pictured below nesting BH gull, BH gulls mobbing a Med gull (Larus melanocephalus), BH gull coming in to land at RSPB Minsmere.

What do adult birds do with all the chick poop in their nests?

If you feed your chicks, then you will have to deal with chick sh*t, there’s no two ways about it, unless you want guano to accumulate in your nest. Here’s an adult emerging from its nest with a mouthful of faecal sac.

A faecal sac is a mucous membrane that surrounds the faeces of the chicks of some nesting birds. It allows the parents to more easily remove waste from the nest. A faecal sac is usually dispensed within seconds of feeding, presumably full of waste from the previous meal. Adults will wait in the nest after feeding their brood until a faecal sac is produced but they may have to prod the youngster’s cloaca with their beak to stimulate excretion.

Here’s the same parent a second or two later taking flight with a mouthful to discard the toxic waste away from the nest

Less toilet based photos of great spotted woodpeckers in an earlier post.

Spooning in Aldeburgh

A recent visit to Aldeburgh gave us a small haul of photographic avian trophies, distant Eurasian spoonbills not least, although friends Brian Stone and Peter Green tell me that what I hoped was a nuthatch was actually a wheatear. There was a sweet tweeter out there too, which I think may have been a sedge warbler.

Meanwhile, the spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), tall waterfowl with a spatulate bill, hence the name, scientific binomial hints at the broadness of bill and the second part means white heron. Rare breeding pair in the UK dining on the body of water known as the mere the south part of North Warren Nature Reserve (RSPB). There is also a whole colony on the North Norfolk coast at Holkham. Member of the ibis and spoonbill family, the Threskiornithidae.

Defining the sound of summer

Squealing swifts, the double vocalisations of the song thrush, the romantic ruminations of the robin, the chiff-chaff of the chiffchaff, the yaffling of the green woodpecker, the startled stutterings of the starlings, the warblings of the warblers, the cuckolding cuckoo. Then, of course, there are the birds called Sylvia, atricapilla and communis, the blackcap and whitethroat respectively.

I don’t think I’d ever seen Sylvia atracapilla (the Eurasian blackcap) knowingly until spring 2017, I’d definitely heard the bird, it is a highly evocative sound of spring and summer. Beautiful, vibrant, warbling (the blackcap is one of the warblers). Often referred to as the “Northern Nightingale”. They usually migrate from Europe (Germany and Eastern Europe, specifically) to the British Isles, but many now over-winter in the UK. The males have a blackcap, the female’s cap is more a chestnut brown (as is that of the juveniles).

Blackcaps eat insects and berries and from my observations (having now seen at least a dozen in various locations), they seem to spend much of their time in the mid-level of the woodland, not seen them near the ground and only once high up in a tree, they’re mostly at about 2-3 metres doing their thing.

Anyway, there seemed to be a few about at RSPB Minsmere in the bluebell wood near the visitor centre. I heard this male first, then saw him darting about, fairly high up. He came straight towards me, not as shy as other ones I have seen. As a bustle of birders tried to catch a glimpse of him where he had been with their bins and ‘scopes, I got my camera up to catch his poses and this shot as he fanned his tail in the dappled afternoon sun.