Category: Birds

Food for the garden birds is rather pricey. Certainly not the tuppence-a-bag of the song from Mary Poppins. Admittedly, the bags you buy are a lot more heavily laden with various seeds and grains.

Anyway, discussion is ongoing in my Wild Fen Edge group about when to feed garden birds, so here are some thoughts.

Birds need to eat all year round. So, I put food out all the time – mixed seed peanuts, nyjer seeds, fat balls, flutter butter. Different places in the garden, different heights if possible, near obvious perching points, higher than cat access, some out in the open. Also, not too many feeders close together to avoid disease. Feeders should be emptied and cleaned thoroughly with detergent on a regular basis.

I also have a couple of bird baths of different sizes (one on the ground, one on a stand) and a pond for their drinking and bathing. Birdbath water needs to be changed frequently as the birds commonly add droppings.

I have written about attracting birds to your garden previously, so check out that for more tips and tricks. I’ve seen at least a couple of dozen species in our garden over the years, including the common birds, but also the likes of Grey Heron, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Fieldfare, Redwing, Chiffchaff etc.

An additional point about gardens, native wildflowers are great for insects and so the insectivorous birds. Leave your garden a bit scruffy. Let a few weeds sprout. Create some wild patches, don’t have gravel and lawn throughout and never, ever, ever put down astroturf, you Philistine! Let standing stems go to seed at the end of summer and don’t prune them back until they begin to rot or the birds have emptied them of seed. Stick to #NoMowMay and let it run into June. Also, do #NoPruneJune and basically avoid being overly tidy with your garden. The more scruffy bits, overgrown, weedy, diverse, the more chance of attracting and keeping invertebrates and birds. Let your bushes and ivy produce their berries, these will feed Blackbirds and the like in the winter. They might even attract Fieldfares and Redwings…maybe even Waxwings, if you Rowan (Mountain Ash).

The natural approach is perhaps best and maybe not even putting out food should be the way to go. But, there are two arguments about feeding garden birds one for and one against

The first says we shouldn’t really do it at all, as it brings birds together and can spread disease. Garden feeding can alter behaviour in terms of how birds feed so that some might become reliant on feeders rather than seeking out natural sources of food. There are also issues with the numbers of chicks Blue Tits and some other species are raising and out-competing other local species because they have adopted feeder feeding quite vigorously. Feeders are even thought to have altered migration patterns, viz the over-wintering Blackcaps we now commonly see in English gardens.

The second school of thought suggests that because we have removed the birds’ natural habitats and reduced greatly the numbers of insects on which they would feed through agriculture and development, we need to provide them with alternative habitation and food all year round. Our gardens can offer that.

So, personally, I feed all year round with a few caveats. Such as if I spot an obviously diseased or dead bird in the garden, I’ll remove all feeders, empty them into the bin and give them a good scrub in hot water with detergent. I’ll dry them and put them away for a couple of weeks, to dehabituate the birds to my garden for a while. It’s also a good idea to remove feeders if you see rats. Although rats are perhaps more attracted by bread and meat scraps or cheese. These are not the best choice for bird food anyway, so best not to put those out on bird tables or in feeders.

TL:DR – Record shots of the three Black Terns at a local RSPB reserve.

They say that one good tern deserves another, if you’re talking comic terns. So, when you go looking for one and three come along all at once it’s quite amusing.

As I mentioned in a previous post about processing low-light photos, we were camping, locally…so local in fact that when three Black Terns were mentioned as being present on Ferry Lagoon at RSPB Fen Drayton it was only a short hop from RSPB Ouse Fen where we were camping to get a view of them.

Of course the birds were fishing in the waters there at a distance from the closest viewpoint of between 250 and 300 metres. Quite a distance to look through even a 600mm zoom lens or binoculars, especially on a dull grey day. But, we saw them. regular readers might recall the American Black Tern we chased around Northumberland to see in 2022. The American is Chlidonias niger surinamensis and as far as I know there have not been any sightings of the sub-species in the UK this year. The Black Terns we were watching on Ferry Lagoon are the parent species Chlidonias niger.

As is the wont of vernacular names, there is often only an element of truth in them. Indeed, the Black Tern has a grey, if not blue appearance about its wings, a white rump and a sooty head and almost black bill, at least in its breeding plumage, it is perhaps blacker out of season.

The bird generally fishes on inland water in Europe, Western Asia, and North America. It has a couple of old names, “Blue Darr” (Blue Tern) and “Carr Swallow” (Lake Swallow). The genus name comes from the Ancient Greek, khelidonios, for swallow-like, while the species name, niger means shining black.

I had seen one once before, but briefly, perhaps summer of 2018, flying over the Reedbed Trail area of RSPB Ouse Fen. As I check Birdguides for sightings there are others present in ones twos, and threes all over England. The bird was once common in the Fens, but drainage led to its local extinction by about 1840. It’s wonderful to see it flying here where gravel pits have been morphed into nature reserves as with Ouse Fen and Fen Drayton.

TL:DR – Photos taken in very light with an old camera are never going to come up to snuff unless you use a denoise app like DxO’s PureRaw 3.

We were up early from our camp bed near Ouse Fen on Bank Holiday Monday. The aim was to get on to the RSPB reserve and observe at dawn. The Bitterns had boomed through the night and one or two were still calling when we timorously made our way through the chill (just after) dawn air, it was 5am.

Mrs Sciencebase spotted a solitary Bittern crossing from reedbed to reedbed, the wont of females I believe, homing in on the blown-bottle sound of the males cryptically tucked away among the reeds. So, here she is, the unprocessed shot on the left saved from RAW format from the camera and untouched.

To get the image on the right, I applied the denoising abilities of DxO PureRaw 3, which I think cuts about three “stops” of ISO. I exported it from that app as the portable RAW format known as DNG. This allowed me to open it as if it were a file straight from the camera in PaintShopPro and so start afresh with the denoised file.

PSP has a RAW importer that does what the likes of Lightroom do so you can rescue blownout areas in photos with that issue or correct overall exposure. In the case of the Bittern shot taken with very low light levels, it needed a maximum lift from the dark and dingy DNG file. Once in PSP, I did my usually tweaks, raising brightness a tad, adjusting shadows a little, a spot of highlight boost, a tiny bit of a vibrancy bump, a little application of an unsharp mask, and then a crop.

It’s not too bad a record shot. I have better images of Bitterns in flight taken on sunny day on this and other reserves.

TL:DR – The origins of the aphorism about solitary swallows and the summer.

In his writings on ethics, Aristotle had it that:

One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

Usually, we abbreviate it to just the first part of the quotation, suggesting that seeing an early swallow in the spring may well not mean that the good weather of summer is about to arrive.

Indeed, in Aesop’s fable, The Young Man and the Swallow, we learn of a fellow who spends most of his money on gambling and good living, when he arrives peniless and sees an early swallow in the spring he sells the coat from his back to feed his habits and when the weather turns for the worse, tragically dies of the cold.

It is most likely that Aesop was inspired by the proverb written in Aristotle’s work, Nicomachean Ethics, rather than Aristotle providing us with an executive summary of the fable.

Either way, the Swallows have been in these here parts for at least a couple of weeks now and as you’d expect, it’s a bit chilly at the moment and pouring with rain. We always knew they weren’t great weather forecasters, I suppose.

Footnote

Caught one in low flight over a lawn at NT Plas Newydd in May. Denoised with DxO and motion blur sharpening with Topaz Sharpen.

TL:DR – Tick list of wildlife from my return to the reserves.

Finally, managed a half-decent walk (4km) around a local nature reserve with Mrs Sciencebase this morning after weeks of sporadically atrocious weather, work commitments, and a crippling rip in my Achilles tendon. Nice to be back among the reeds and water espying and hearing all kinds of wildlife:

Birds

Bittern (flypast), Black-headed Gull, Buzzard, Canada Goose, Cetti’s Warbler (calls from three), Coot, Cormorant, Crane (very distant), Great Crested Grebe, Greylag Goose, Heron, Kestrel, Lapwing, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Linnet, Little Grebe, Magpie, Mallard, Marsh Harrier (three or four), Meadow Pipit, Mute Swan, Pheasant, Pochard, Reed Bunting, Reed Warbler (calls from at least three), Rook, Sand Martin, Sedge Warbler, Shoveler, Skylark, Stock Dove, Swallow, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon.

Mammals

Chinese Water Deer, Hare

Lepidoptera

Large White

You can find my photos of all of those species on my Imaging Storm website.

TL:DR – There is no evidence that Blackcaps that overwinter in the UK are “demigrating”, they all tend to leave by mid-April. That said, much of their migratory behaviour remains a mystery.

I’ve written about a warbler species we see here in the summer known as the Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla, several times on Sciencebase. Commonly, for many, many years, thousands in fact, Blackcaps that migrate to the UK in the summer have spent the northern winter in Iberia or North Africa. They migrate north to south and back again, year in, year out.

There is, however, a number of Blackcaps that tend to spend the northern summer in mainland continental Europe, Southern Germany and Austria, for instance. Those in the western part of that region then head somewhat west for the winter to spend the colder months on the Iberian peninsula or in the northern parts of Africa. Those in the eastern part head South East presumably to Serbia, Croatia, Greece etc.

In the last 20-30 years or so there has been a shift in behaviour among these German Blackcaps, ast least the ones in the west. Some of them seem to have lost their internal compass calibration and have been turning up in the UK for the winter instead of the slightly balmier climes of Spain and Portugal. Their internal compass is genetically programmed into these short-lived migratory birds though and so this “mistake” has proven beneficial as it has proliferated in a sub-population of the birds that find well-stocked garden feeders in British gardens. They have thus taken to over-wintering here and then find their way back to the continent for the summer come late March or early April.

Over the last few years, we usually have a male in our Cambridgeshire garden, and one year recently we had both a male and a female. They seem to join in the stripping of mistletoe berries from the trees as well as partaking of the fat balls we hang in the garden. Previously, they have departed in the spring not to be seen again until the winter. We never see Blackcaps in our gardens in the summer, but we do see them in local woodland and these would’ve been birds that overwintered in Iberia and North Africa.

There is now some intriguing evidence that the UK overwintering Blackcaps are not mixing so well with their Iberian counterparts and that we might begin to see speciation taking place. In this, they might ultimately stop interacting and mating and begin to diverge genetically into two sub-species. If the evolutionary pressure is sustained they might one day split into two distinct species.

Now, the male that has been in our garden through the whole of the winter of 2022-2023 has recently been singing rather vigourously from our rowan tree. It was as if he was attempting to establish breeding territory although given his shyness at the feeders compared to the sparrows and even the tits, maybe he was just singing with frustration. Of course, the males do start to sing, or at least partially sing, in March under normal circumstances, perhaps rehearsing for their leading role once they get back to their summer breeding grounds.

I asked Greg Conway of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), who has undertaken a lot of research on Blackcap migration about the misinformation that seems to be circulating that claims some overwintering Blackcaps are becoming resident. You can read about work on Blackcap migration in a paper from van Doren et al. on which he is co-author here: https://doi.org/doi/10.1111/gcb.15597

“Virtually all the wintering birds do migrate in the spring and head across the Channel,” he told me. “Currently, there are just a handful of British-bred birds that have remained here to winter, amongst the more than 1000 of ringing recoveries.” He adds that “The winter tracking work did not reveal any resident individuals.”

The bottom line then is that demigration is not happening in Blackcaps. Conway expanded on what I suspected about the behaviour of my own overwintering Blackcap:

“Typically, the wintering birds depart between mid-March and mid-April.,” he explains. “And, just before they go, they gorge themselves at the garden feeders to build fat stores for their long journey. So you might see a bit more feeding activity this week.” He added that I should expect my Blackcap to depart in the next spell of fine weather. Indeed, by the 9th April our overwintering Blackcap had departed.

We know a lot about bird migration and movement but much remains a mystery. I’ve previously discussed the cases of Little, Great White, and Cattle Egrets, Spoonbill, and Glossy Ibis. All of those species have extended their range into the UK over the last few decades. Of course, many migratory patterns have been altered by the ice ages, shifts and changes in environment and food supply, and in the modern age climate change.

“There is still so much we don’t know about Blackcaps and their migratory behaviour,” adds Conway. Licensed ringing and citizen science observations and reporting from birders, of course, are helping build up a picture of what happens. Hopefully, one day we can expect to get a clear understanding of this little bird’s comings and goings. Conway adds that there is also an initiative for reporting ringed Blackcap sightings. If you see any ringed individuals you can send date and place details and whether male (black cap) or female (brown cap, also juveniles have a brown cap) to [email protected]

UPDATE: 24th March 2024 – Having not seen any Blackcaps in our garden this winter, sudden sighting of a male feeding on our mistletoe. So, maybe he’s been around but just not visible. The Merlin app has certainly heard him a couple of times in the last few days when I stick my phone next to our open bedroom window some mornings at 7am-ish. (Our overwintering male Blackcap had departed our garden by the end of the first week of April 2023).