Category: Birds

I’ve mentioned Burwell and Tubney Fens previously, depending how you approach them, they are the back end of the NT Wicken Fen area. The semi-feral Konik ponies (Equus ferus caballus) of Polish descent there along with longhorn cattle (Bos primigenius) and European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), are natural managers of the scrub.

The area is almost perfect roosting and hunting for Short-eared Owls, which have once again returned from Scandinavia to the Fen for their winter break.

There were three to four showing quite well and being harried and harangued by Rooks on the wing high above the fen.

I don’t think any of the clutch of photographers (Homo sapiens phoographiensis) photographing the birds got any particularly close views, but there’s the rest of the winter to try before the birds fly back to their summer breeding grounds next March.

Pleasant enough evening and as we didn’t get to North Norfolk as originally planned to see the Red Knot on the high tide, I headed to our local housing estate balancing pond hoping to see a few Starlings bedding down at dusk in the reed beds there. And, they were, not quite murmuration numbers as there had been at this time last year, maybe half a dozen small flocks of 25-50 birds.

Visiting our daughter in the North East will usually find us dragging her somewhere coastal. This time it was Druridge Bay in my home county of Northumberland. One of the most glorious places and one that has special childhood memories for not least family caravan holidays in Amble at the north end and Cresswell and Cambois at the south.

Also, first demo/festival/benefit I attended (aged 10) was to protest against plans to build a nuclear power station there. We blocked that, but I see now that they’re hoping to exploit this beautiful and wild place by opening an open-cast coalmine. FFS.

Meanwhile, the birds are blissful in their ignorance of the mankind’s machinations: Bar tailed Godwit, Barnacle Goose, Blackbird, Black-headed Gull, Blue Tit, Chaffinch, Coal Tit, Common Scoter, Cormorant, Curlew, Eider, Goldfinch, Great-crested Grebe, Herring Gull, Jackdaw, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Magpie, Marsh Tit, Oystercatcher, Pheasant, Pink-footed Goose, Red-throated Diver, Redshank, Reed Bunting, Rook, Sanderling, Shelduck, Sparrowhawk, Starling, Stonechat, Turnstone, Wren…it’s possible I’ve overlooked a couple of others.

Fighting hard against low light levels the whole time, we departed just as the rain started and trip to St Mary’s Island and Lighthouse was scuppered by weather and high tide.

Life on the Fen Edge

— With Sir David Attenbradley –

from the BBC, the British Bradcasting Corporation

EPISODE 1: I HEARD A MURMUR
EPISODE 2: GOLDFINCH DYNASTY
EPISODE 3: YOUNG PEOPLE’S BEAT COMBO
EPISODE 4: CUMULUS

Had a short visit, via a circuitous A14 diversion to Grafham Water reservoir while the sun was shining, drove home in the rain. Intriguingly, there was a warning sign about not swimming and needed higher-spec buoyancy aids because the water is aerated and so, presumably, of lower, less buoyant density than normal water. Anyway, a few photos. Not of the sign.

Birdlife ticked on the morning; Tufted Duck, Great Black-backed Gull, Greylag Goose, Mandarin, Shelduck, Linnet, Robin, Wren, Starling, Stonechat, Meadow Pippet, Yellowhammer, Redwing, Goldfinch, Blackbird, Jackdaw, Rook, Mute Swan, Common Buzzard (9 together!), Pied Wagtail, Kestrel, Red Kite, House Sparrow, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Cormorant…Swallows (two, still actively feeding/drinking!)

Three species of butterfly: Small Tortoiseshell, European Peacock, Large White.

The White Stork, Ciconia ciconia, is a scientific tautonym, its binomial being duplicated to indicate that ciconia is the “type”, the archetype, of the family Ciconia. This is the bird of birth myth, the one that bears the infant baby to the homes of expectant parents. Perhaps the myth arose because they build great nests of straw on chimneys in the summer.

Anyway, the White Stork is rarely seen in The British Isles. You might see them nesting on rooftops in Germany, Poland, Finland, and beyond. They are relatively common across Europe and not of conservation concern, wintering in southern Africa and breeding far and wide into Europe and Asia. They need thermals to soar and so cross from Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar and “The Levant” rather than attempting to navigate the Mediterranean Sea, which obviously doesn’t produce the thermals they need.

There was much excitement among Cambridgeshire birders when a ringed bird was spotted at a couple of RSPB sites, Ouse Fen and Fen Drayton, in April 2018 and another (the same one?) sighted in various places across the county in early 2019.

There is a small flock of captive, ringed White Storks at Johnson’s Farm in Old Hurst, the farm with the crocodiles. My photos on this blog post were all snapped at the farm on Talk Like a Pirate Day 2019. Aharrgh.

Kittiwakes live on the tidal river Tyne as far inland as my hometown, Newcastle itself. In fact, this is the farthest inland-dwelling colony of this small gull, known internationally as the black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) anywhere in the world.

We were in Newcastle for a university graduation ceremony in July, so it seemed somewhat churlish not to get photos of the seabirds in between family photos of us and the graduate and the great city itself. As Stephen Rutt points out in his excellent book The Seafarers, nobody has figured out why these Kittiwakes have come so far inland.

Mrs Sciencebase and I visited our peripatetic holiday house* to High Sands Creek campsite in Stiffkey, Norfolk, this weekend, turned out to be the hottest weekend of the year so far. Lots and lots of rather worn looking Painted Lady butterflies during the day and Silver Y pollinating the wildflowers at dusk.

A long, hot walk to Wells-next-the-Sea from the campsite was peppered with the usual seabird suspects of summer in this area – Oystercatcher, Curlew, Red Shank – and quite a few warblers in the trees along the footpath. It’s quite a hike from the east end of Wells to the pine-backed beaches of golden sand and beach huts to the west. The aroma of the pine and the heat of the day might make the somnambulant visitor imagine dreamily that they are on a Mediterranean island. It is quite beautiful and one of the many reasons we make return visits to this part of the world and have done so for almost thirty years.

Anyway, we had at various points along the hike seen what we thought were large, odd-looking herons overhead. It was only on seeing one wading and feeding along the shore of the inlet, East Fleet, that we realised that what we had been watching were Spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia).

There are a few of the birds at Holkham, further west around the coast, perhaps one might describe it as a breeding colony and ironically enough they were spotted at Stiffkey Fen a couple of days before our arrival. The “spoon” shaped bill of this bird, Mrs Sciencebase remarked is quite something, but perhaps a more apt name would The Spatula-billed Heron.

Sadly, this species is of European conservation concern and is actually only a rare breeding bird in the UK. It is thought there are only up to 4 breeding pairs in the UK. That said, on a fairly recent visit to RSPB Minsmere we caught a glimpse of around 30 Spoonbills (out of breeding season some of them arrive here to over-winter). I’ve seen two previously at RSPB North Warren on the northern outskirts of Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

But, on this more recent coastal trip to North Norfolk we may have seen a total of half a dozen, with one or two spotted in flight at different times over the weekend and the individual above I photographed in Wells-next-the-Sea.

Amazingly, only one other person in the town walking along the East Fleet seemed to notice the bird, he ran down to get a photo with his phone shouting about it being a “dessert spoonbill” to his friends and, of course, he spooked it and it took flight…which did give me an opportunity to snap it in flight much closer.

*Our tent.

The biannual Fen Edge Festival took place midsummer weekend 21-23rd June 2019. As ever, exciting but exhausting with lots of music and other events, stalls, etc. I side-stepped being an official photographer this year in favour of doing a bit more “musical” performance, but I still managed to get a few photos of the birds that The Raptor Foundation had brought along.

The Bataleur Eagle (Terathopius ecaudatus) is one of Africa’s snake-eating eagles. It’s a medium-sized eagle but up close and personal looks quite huge. Mainly black with distinctive white on the underside of its enormous wings. More distinctive still are its red face and feet. These are brightest when the bird is comfortable and happy, but it can withdraw the blood from these parts of its body when agitated leaving the face and feet yellow. This is presumably an adaptation that protects it from a snakebite. The blood being withdrawn from vulnerable exposed parts that might sucumb to venom.

The Bataleur that the team brought to FEF19 was a female called Captain Scarlet. The bird has a foreshortened tail which is an adaptation that allows it to walk backwards on the ground. This it does when hunting snakes. A snake will perceive another animal backing away as being vulnerable and likely prey.

The eagle backs away enticing in the snake and by this time it will have withdrawn the blood from its face and feet. It will strike the snake with its talons but if the snake tries to retaliate by biting the bird before its demise, there is no blood in the vulnerable extremities to carry the snake’s venom into the bird’s system. Once it has dispatched, the snake, the bird will eat it and in the meantime, the blood will flood back into its face and feet pushing out any venom through the puncture wounds!

The Raptor Foundation also brought along a European Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo) called Klunk. Its scientific name is one of those tautonyms I keep mentioning. The double of the scientific name like this means this species is the archetype, the type, of the family.

They brought with them a tiny Southern White-faced Owl (Ptilopsis granti) from Southern Africa, called, ironically, Goliath. Mrs Sciencebase and myself certainly heard this species in Botswana many years ago, but at the time they were known as White-faced Scops Owls.

There was a Barn Owl (Tyto Alba), and a Tawny Owl (Strix aluco). The female of this species is the one that calls out to the males “Too-wit” and the male replies “Two-woo”. You can usually then know if there are at least two Tawny owls, a male and a female around. Except, of course, confusingly the females also sometimes make the call back to themselves.