Category: Birds

Sunday morning was bright, cold, a few streaky clouds in the sky, but sun shining through. We were not quite up with the lark, but we got booted up and headed out for a brisk walk at one of our local patches where we often see Kingfishers and various other bird species. River Great Ouse running through farmland and along the bank top of one of the lodes that drain the fens, once around a fishing pond. Was expecting to see maybe a dozen bird species, but we counted all of these and maybe a couple more for which we didn’t get a positive identification, little brown jobs (LBJs), in other words.

Blackbird
Blackheaded Gull
Blue Tit
Bullfinch
Buzzard
Chaffinch
Collared Dove
Coot
Cormorant
Dunnock
Fieldfare
Goldfinch
Great Spotted Woodpecker
Great Tit
Grey Heron
Grey Wagtail
Kestrel
Kingfisher
Linnet
Little Grebe
Mallard
Mute Swan
Pied Wagtail
Redwing
Reed Bunting
Robin
Rook
Song Thrush
Whooper Swan
Wood Pigeon
Wren

2020-11-23 UPDATE: Today’s outing was to the village of Fen Drayton to see the five Cattle Egrets that have settled there temporarily. We saw those birds and quite a few more besides, venturing only a little way into the RSPB bird reserve that is adjacent to the village. Today’s list:

Cattle Egret, Blackbird, Blackheaded Gull, Blue Tit, Chaffinch, Collared Dove, Coot Cormorant, Dunnock, Gadwall, Goldfinch Green Woodpecker, Kestrel, Mallard, Mute Swan, Pied Wagtail, Pochard, Red Kite, Redwing, Robin, Rook, Tufted Duck, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon

Back in September, the number of starlings on farmland around the village seemed to build. It seemed early for the European winter influx, maybe it was just wishful thinking. I was hoping for large numbers that would begin to murmurate over the Broad Lane balancing pond before diving into their nocturnal roost in the reed bed there. (This particular video of mine was from November 2018)

Other concerns took over my thought processes, as they are, in October and early November, and I’d all but forgotten about the starlings by the time the local birders started pinging me about rising numbers 30 to 20 minutes before sunset over the pond. When I finally got the opportunity to check out the swooping and swirling of these maestros of social distancing, the murmurations were occurring most evenings and the numbers, I and birding friend Neil (watching at two-metres distance) estimated there were about 6000 there. Quite an amazing sight and the whooshing as they soar close overhead before diving into the reeds is astonishing. The next evening, the numbers had grown, perhaps to around 7000.

That was the peak for Cottenham’s murmuration. Over subsequent nights and having shared video on social media and mentioned to a few friends, the numbers began to decline as the number of observers rose. At the human peak, I think there were about 20 people, adults and children and a few pet dogs, waiting patiently for Dave’s Spectacular. It hadn’t happened in Cottenham again as far as I know. Another friend, Liz, reported that their daughter suggested 12 starlings wasn’t quite what you’d expect from Sir David…

Meanwhile, the Cottenham birder list alerted me to a large number at RSPB Fen Drayton, some 7000 birds were murmurating there over Elney Lake. It could easily be the same flock that apparently had departed Cottenham. There was also a peregrine falcon there hunting through the flock. Indeed, murmurating is flocking behaviour to reduce the risk to the individual bird being predated by such raptors ahead of bedding down for the night. I got a little distant video footage of those birds.

Also to be seen at Fen Drayton, four cattle egrets, birds that until recently were rarely seen in the British Isles, but whose numbers like those of the Little Egret and Great White Egret, ostensibly “foreign” birds have been growing over the last couple of decades. Climate change may well be playing a part in how such species are extending their range.

The story doesn’t end there. We visited RSPB Ouse Fen (Reedbed Trail side, accesses from the car park at the Over edge) one morning in mid-November. The RSPB warden – Hannah Bernie – was still there with her team hacking back reeds with a view to increasing plant, and thence animal, diversity on the reserve. She told us that they had spotted another rare visitor, a glossy ibis. The bird had been spotted at Fen Drayton a couple of nights before, but had flown, and this was presumably the same bed making Ouse Fen its temporary home. One birder I spoke to on the day I saw the GI told me he’d seen five or six on the reserve during the last decade or so.

The warden also mentioned in passing that they had a large starling murmuration of about 10000 birds. I felt obliged to return that evening to witness the spectacle. That night I would estimate that there were at least twice as many birds as there had been at Cottenham’s peak, so perhaps 14000.

Of course, such numbers are minuscule compared to other murmurations such as the knot (a wader, or shorebird) that one sees at this time of year, hopping the tide at RSPB Snettisham in North Norfolk. We saw 68000 of those birds there in September and the numbers had doubled by late October. And those numbers are dwarfed by the multi-million strong murmurations one might see in the original sub-Saharan homes of some of those “foreign” birds I mentioned. Where vast, entrancing murmurations swoop and swirl above the cattle egrets pecking at the feet of herds of majestic wildebeest. Still, we must enjoy the nature to which we have relatively easy access, especially in times of covid.

Sir David Attenbradley

UPDATE: As of 2020-12-08 there have been sightings of about seven Glossy Ibis around the area at RSPB Fen Drayton, Ouse Fen, Ouse Washes, at Earith Sluice, and elsewhere. This is almost an irruption!

You don’t expect to turn up at a Cambridgeshire wildlife reserve to be told by the warden (Hannah Bernie) that there’s an African bird species hanging around. But, in early November, that’s what we heard at RSPB Ouse Fen. Actually, I’d heard that this species was at RSPB Fen Drayton, but I’m not a real twitcher so hadn’t gone out of my way to see it there. We were actually there on a fairly calm day to see if we could sight the Bearded Reedlings.

Warden Hannah told us there was a Glossy Ibis, Plegadis falcinellus, present and it had been seen but it was lurking behind the reeds at the time. She also mentioned a 10000-starling murmuration the night before. I visited the same sight later that day and reckon there are 14000 starlings murmurating there.

Anyway, back to the GI, we didn’t see it and we only heard Beardies. So I headed back again today, I usually visit once a week. Parked up and within 200m of the car, there it was, on the edge of the reeds. Apparently, a birder had predicted one might turn up, the RSPB having cleared a lot of old reeds from these former gravel pits. I got a few record shots, nothing clear nor sharp.

Fellow walker – name of Richard – with a birding ‘scope, stopped 2-3 metres away from me as I was snapping the bird on my return pass. He mentioned that they are not as rare as one might imagine in the British Isles these days. He said he’d seen them five or six times over a decade of visiting this reserve. Given that other African birds – Little, Great White, and Cattle Egret are also rising in numbers here we mused on how even the most casual birders are no longer as impressed as they once were at the sight of such species. Indeed, the presence of a Whinchat or a Pied Flycatcher might be more exciting than any Egret or even the GI, amazingly.

Climate change will definitely be driving the northwards flights of these birds which originate in sub-Saharan Africa but are spreading their range. But, Richard also mentioned that the accidental introduction of Red Swamp Crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) to lakes in northern France had provided a lot of food for such species and they are thus much further north partly because of that. It is only a matter of time, perhaps, before that invasive crustacean finds a niche in the former gravel pits of East Anglia and we begin to see even greater numbers of these African birds settling in this part of the world.

First time I saw a wild Glossy Ibis was in Botswana in the early 1990s, if memory serves. Most recent sighting was on the edge of a former gravel pit in a windswept patch of South Cambridgeshire.

Months ago, at the beginning of lockdown 1.0 I think I mentioned nocmigging. It’s the nocturnal audio recording and analysis of overnight sounds that might include the calls of migrant birds flying overhead. In April, I set up a microphone and recording software and poked it out of my office window and left it running overnight. In the morning I checked to see what had recorded and sadly it seemed at the time that the software had failed and all I had was the first 20 minutes from when I set things running.

I had tried a few more times and had managed to record the dawn chorus once or twice, but I didn’t think I had captured a long period of nocturnal noises until I was scanning my hard drive with the aim of deleting unwanted large files to clear some space. I found a 6h45m 4.5 gigabyte audio file. Exciting stuff.

So, now processing with Audacity in spectrogram view with the aim of feeding the output into the nocmig software. Here’s how to configure audacity for a nocmig recording.

Turns out there’s very little to hear other than occasional motorbikes and cars, at least until the first Blackbird of the dawn chorus, followed by Robins, Dunnocks, Wrens, and Wood Pigeons. Nothing was apparent and high-pitched in the spectrogram during the preceding hours. And, an audio scan didn’t even give me muntjac, foxes, nor even cats in the night, possibly one very distant dog barking. It was all very quiet, sadly. Still, there’s always next year.

As winter encroaches (it’s mid-September and we’re in the middle of an Indian Summer here in East Anglia, ahem), the (Red) Knot, Calidris canutus, start to flock on The Wash and their tidal activity can be seen as the waves break repeatedly and these waders take to to the air in their thousands, if not tens of thousands.

We were treated to a wader wonder on 17th September 2020, at Snettisham Beach on the North Norfolk coast. Patiently we watched the tide rise and the birds feeding and occasionally flocking. At the point there was essentially no visible mud flat remaining, the birds flock and make like a murmuration of starlings, whirling and cavorting in a seemingly coordinated way. Sometimes they head further out to sea, but occasionally a flock will fly overhead and head for the lagoons behind us. It is quite incredible, the sight and the sound.

Difficult to time it just right. It has to be the perfect tide, the right conditions, and you have to be lucky to be there.

I’ve mentioned RSPB Ouse Fen a lot over the last few years, it’s a lovely quiet patch of flooded gravel pits, with some woodland, and reedbeds etc, not far from where we live. There are two ways to get to it, one is a lot closer and takes you into the reedbed side of the reserve, the far side is a longer drive and takes you through the more wooded areas. Both are nice, but I tend to favour the reedbed side.

We visited again today, quite a lot of avian activity: Cormorant, Great White Egret, Mute Swan, various ducks and other waterfowl, Snipe (6x), Marsh Harrier (3x), Kestrel (2x), Reed Bunting, Whitethroat, Reed Warbler, Blue Tit, Common Buzzard, Goldfinch (20x), Linnet (10x), Housemartins (24+) and various waders we could hear but didn’t see.

Highlight for Mrs Sciencebase was her spotting a Bittern, this is the first time she’s ticked that particular heron, I believe, and was quite pleased to have finally seen one, having heard the males calling several times over the years at this and other places. As with that other heron, the egret, there are several obvious puns to be made, which I’ve done to death over the years. I have no egrets and remember once bittern…etc…

Meanwhile, it’s almost the end of August, temperature has been dropping, winds and rain picking up, and yet still seeing swallows, warblers, housemartins, and even an occasional swift that haven’t yet headed south for the winter. And, of course, there are still Osprey chicks at Rutland Water as I reported last week.

Rutland Water is a reservoir, an artificial lake in the English Midlands. Several years ago, they introduced Osprey chicks from Scotland in a conservation experiment to see whether this migratory raptor would breed in England again. The experiment was rather successful. You can read all the details on the Wildlife Trust’s site, save me repeating it here…

We’ve seen and photographed one of the Ospreys from the road that passes the reservoir having failed to see them from the northside reserve a couple of years ago. But on a visit in August 2020 we took to the hides on the southern shore…just as the rain came.

We saw four Ospreys coming and going, perching, flapping, feeding, flying, on the perches and on the nest. One adult delivered fish to a juvenile (the pair had three chicks this year, I believe and one of them has already headed south to Africa for the winter). We could even see one bathing on the opposite shore.

Unfortunately, taking photographs from 500 metres away through sheets of rain does not make for great wildlife photography. But, this is what I got, shooting with a Canon 7D mark ii fitted with a Sigma 150-600mm lens. All photos were developed in RAW Therapee and then processed and cropped in PaintShop Pro.

Also of note seen from the hides: Snipe, Green Sandpiper, Spotted Flycatcher, Grey Heron, Little Egret, Lapwing, Sedge Warbler, Stonechat, juvenile Common Tern, juvenile Blue Tit.

Recently, I mentioned the presence of an intriguing seabird spotted flying over our very land-locked Cambridgeshire village – the Northern Fulmar, Fulmarus glacialis. The nearest flock of nesting Fulmar is on the layered cliffs that back the North beach at Sunny Hunny, Hunstanton on the North Norfolk coast looking out across The Wash and beyond to St Botolph’s in in the Lincolnshire town of Boston.

Fulmars sit in the Petrels and Shearwaters group of birds, the Procellariiformes meaning the tubenoses. So-called because along the crest of their bill they have a tubular structure that encloses one or two nostrils. They might be confused with gulls but a closer view reveals them to be rather different and even at a distance their stiff-winged flight is a giveaway.

The red-footed falcon, Falco vespertinus, is usually found in eastern Europe and Asia but its numbers are falling because of habitat loss (what a surprise) and hunting (ditto). It is usually migrates south to Africa in the Winter. Occasionally vagrants are seen in western Europe in the summer.

Interestingly, one has been hanging around this last week or so at RSPB Fen Drayton, which is close to a village not far from us here in Cottenham. It’s apparently a first-year female so obviously not the same bird that has been seen on the same patch in previous years. We paid a visit to the reserve today and although light levels were poor for photography and the bird was perching on fence posts about 400-500 metres away from the guided busway that runs through the site, we got a good view of her and a few photos for the gallery.

The whole time we were watching a Cetti’s Warbler was calling noisily from the trees behind us and there was a cuckoo doing its cuckoo thing not much further along the trees parallel to the busway.

Once home again, I heard on the birding grapevine that a Fulmar (a seabird many kilometres away from its normal range, although they do breed in Hunstanton in North Norfolk, apparently) had been seen flying over the woodland that nestles in the farmland between us and our village neighbour. There is also a Marsh Warbler showing nicely at NT Wicken Fen. This species usually spends the summer in Continental Europe (not Iberia, France, nor Italy though) and is another interesting vagrant to this area. One has to wonder whether lockdown and our changing habits and reduced activity over the last few weeks is changing the habits of some of these avian species.

Just a few shots of the juvenile startling starlings fighting for fatballs. The adults have fledged about eight noisy juveniles into our garden so far, I estimate.