Birds – Page 28 – David Bradley

Birdlife at Stiffkey Marshes

We made an impromptu trip to Stiffkey on the North Norfolk coast, stopped overnight at the Red Lion Inn, it was almost dark by the time we got there but there were lots of loose flocks (skeins) of geese coming home to roost on the marshes. The initial attractor had been rumours of waxwings around the car park near our old stamping ground High Sands Campsite.

An earlyish breakfast the next morning had us legging it to that area in search of Bombycilla garrulus, none to be seen but a big flock of linnets was chasing around the neighbouring hedgerows, we could hear lots of curlews (in flight directly below this paragraph) and could see pale-bellied Brent goose, red shank (pictured above), little egret, kestrel, stonechat, snipe, bar-tailed godwit, cormorant, lapwing, fieldfare, oystercatcher, pochard, shelduck, black-headed gull, redwing, dunlin, sandpiper, yellowhammer, skylark, greenfinch, chaffinch, meadow pipit, turnstone, wigeon, and a real mixed bag of other birds spending November on around the marshes.

There are countless other species appearing on the North Norfolk coast according to the proper birders: black brant goose, Iceland gull, glaucous gull*, Lapland bunting, cattle egret*, great white egret*, Slavonian grebe, spotted redshanks*, water pipit, snow bunting*, Tundra bean goose*, great Northern diver*, long-tailed duck*, little stint*, velvet scoter*, hawfinch*, Caspian gull, goshawk, Richard’s pipit, shorelark, rough-legged buzzard, yellow-browed warbler, Sabine’s gull, grey phalarope, little auk, black-throated diver, red-necked grebe, Leach’s petrel, Pomarine skua, black guillemot, ring ouzel, twite, purple sandpiper*, scaup, white-fronted goose*, dotterel.

Now, that list is what sets us apart from the proper birders, not only would I not recognise nor spot the majority of those, I’ve not even heard of a half a dozen of them before.

*We have since seen the asterisked species in various places.

The pelican brief: birds of Australia

Following on from my earlierÂ Australian bird of the year post (no Kylie nor Nicole jokes, purleez), here are a few grainy scans from the albums of Mr & Mr Sciencebase from Oct-Dec 1989.

Top to bottom: Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus), comb-crested jacana (Irediparra gallinacea), Australian brush (or bush) turkey (Alectura lathami), sulfur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), Major Mitchell’s cockatoo (Lophochroa leadbeateri), azure kingfisher (Ceyx azureus),Â eastern great egretÂ (Ardea alba modesta),Â Royal spoonbillÂ (Platalea regia) alongside little egret, Eastern great egret (Ardea alba modesta) and gull.

Australian bird of the year

UPDATE: And the winner is:Â The Australian magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) with 19,926 votes, second place was the Australian white ibis (Threskiornis molucca) with 19,083 votes and the laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) gets the bronze with just 10,953 votes.

ClassicFM’s @TimLihoreau alerted me over breakfast this morning (via the “airwaves”, that is) that The Grauniad is publicising the vote for Australia’s bird of the year. Now, having visited and traveled several thousand miles through Australia back in October-December 1989, I can vouch for the abundance and have a few photos in my collection.

I mentioned to Tim that I remembered @Mrs_Sciencebase and myself sitting on the harbour wall in Cairns after our day’s diving (snorkelling, actually) on The Great Barrier Reef, when a huge pelican sat down with us…not six feet away. I don’t think we ever saw a Willie Wagtail but she claims to have seen a cockatoo…

Ahem, that aside, in our albums (remember those?) we do have photos of the magpie lark (Grallina cyanoleuca), also known as the peewee, peewit or mudlark. We saw great egrets, pelicans elsewhere (the one pictured above was snapped in Nitmiluk National Park), sulfur-crested cockatoos, and the highlight a salt water crocodile hunting and catching magpie geese. The guide on our boat in that particular billabong told us we would be unlikely to see a croc at all!

More of our photos of the birds of Australia in my blog post The Pelican Brief.

Photographing birds in flight

Unless, you have been avoiding me this year, you will know I have been photographing a lot of birds. Well over 130 native and migrant species in the UK so far. I am stockpiling the best photos for my forthcoming book: “Chasing Wild Geese“.

One thing that everyone but the most experienced photographers struggle with is catching a crisp photo of a bird in flight, specifically as it takes off from a perch. I have managed it once or twice, but the issue tends to be that you need a short shutter speed to catch the action. Unfortunately, that then either means that your depth of field is very short (so focus is in the plane at a given distance rather than spread from near to far, therefore only a point on the bird will be sharp. Or, if you manage to get the f-stop number higher, then the ISO will need to be higher too to allow enough light in to properly expose the shot, which means more sensitivity of your sensor and more noise.

Depending on your lens you’re not going to get good depth of field with a fast shutter speed unless the ISO is really high, but you can try and push it and put up with ISO noise or balance. My Sigma 150-600 on my Canon 6D at full extent will give me 1/1250s with f/9 but the ISO will be into the several thousand if I am lurking among trees trying to photograph goldcrests or treecreepers for instance or well up even out in the open on a sunny day. Shutterspeeds shorter than 1/2000s will freeze wing movements of small birds.

You have to be ready and steady, focused on the bird’s eye, with the bird perched and have the camera in burst mode. Hold the camera in landscape mode and have your frame with the bird to one side so there’s space for it to fly into in the frame. (Select a focus point in your viewfinder to the side and have that over the bird’s eye when you focus). Push the button as soon as the bird flutters (it might be a false alarm, reset your stance) but keep the shutter depressed while it takes flight. You can get some great shots. I don’t think I’ve achieved greatness yet, but I am trying! Another tip I’ve learned fairly recently – use the back focusing button with your thumb, this looks you on, and frees you up to be trigger happy at the right time with shutter release. Speaking of which, sharper is as sharper does – tripod and remote shutter control, might improve your outcome but make it harder to track and focus birds that are already in flight.

Are great tit beaks really getting greater?

Heard a news snippet on BBC Radio 4 this morning reporting on how Brits using bird feeders has apparently led to great tits (Parus major) evolving longer beaks. I read an article or two (National Geographic and The Guardian) to check out how the science was being reported elsewhere and then took a look at the original research paper itself.

The researchers talk of 26-year data set from live birds in Wytham and estimate a 4 micrometre Â± 1 micrometre per year lengthening in this species. That seems like quite a small change, despite that their analysis of avian genetics in this species allows them to suggest some kind of correlation with bird feeder use compared to Dutch counterparts where no lengthening was observed. Could bird feeders really have had sufficient impact on brood size rates they discuss for great tits? For a start, is 4 micrometres actually significant at all in 2500 birds measured…that’s some pretty mean measuring but with a 25% error bar…?

Research paper is here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6361/365

Free “Chasing Wild Geese” sampler

You can get a FREE 11-bird PDF ebook sampler of my forthcoming book: Chasing Wild Geese: Spotting your first 100 birds here.

Three herons

You wait around all summer, waiting for a grey heron (Ardea cinerea) and then as the leaves start falling three come along all at once, cavorting and basking in the autumnal sunshine. They took flight when they saw me and the dog, but landed on the other side of the bridge, then began whirling back and forth across the road and landing within 15 metres for me to photograph them. Not sure whether that one in the upper photo was trying to get a better look at my lens or what…

Wren – Troglodytes troglodytes

At the time of writing, the UK’s Environment Agency is busy clearing reeds from the Cottenham Lode to allow the drain to do its job properly in the winter. The reed warblers, reed buntings, whitethroats, corn buntings, meadow pipits, linnets, yellowhammers, and others that spent the summer along the Lode and in the fields and hedgerows close to it all seem quiet or to have moved on. The warblers migrating to warmer climes, the buntings, pipits, and linnets maybe just hiding or perhaps having relocated away from close to the watercourse to elsewhere in the surrounding countryside.

However, I did spot one straggler. The UK’s smallest and most common native bird, the Wren. It was flitting in and out of the reeds and almost playing at reed warbler earlier today possibly taking its last chance to snatch at insects and spiders living among the water plants before that EA dredger scrapes them out of the water and dumps them on the bank of the flood defences.

Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) – the name Wren comes from a German word of unknown origin. In old High German the bird is also known as a kuningilin meaning kinglet. The troglodytes of its scientific name comes from the Greek meaning something that dives into a (mouse) hole (or in a related sense a “cave dweller”). The doubling of the word makes it a tautonym, which I’ve mentioned before means this species is the “type” of the family.

Having stalked this particular specimen for a few minutes on a drizzly, lunchtime dog walk, I eventually got a decent snap of it clinging to a reed stump (see above) and also caught it as it took flight (below). I should add that this is probably the same specimen I photographed on this exact patch of reeds at the beginning of the year.

Treecreeper – Certhia familiaris

Back in June 2017, I spotted a pair of treecreepers (Certhia familiaris) creeping up a tree in the local, Rampton, woodland. I was too close to get a shot with the zoom lens and by the time I’d stepped back from the tree they’d crept around the back and out of sight, flying off when I took another step towards them. I framed the blurry tail of one of the pair.

Ever since, I walk through the same patch of woodland quietly in the hope that they’re there again, they never are. But, I did see another specimen on the edge of the wood close to the Cottenham Lode. Again, too close for the lens to focus, unfortunately. I’ve seen and photographed the unrelated nuthatch (Sitta europaea) which also creeps up tree trunks and along branches. Treecreepers only creep upwards though.

At last, 3rd October 2017, listening and spotting long-tailed tits in Rampton Spinney (again), I hear some high-pitched warbling among the whistles and chatter of the longtails. Look up at the nearest ash tree and there’s a treecreeper heading up to the canopy. Quick snap of it and then another lands. So, at long last, a decent shot or two of this active and resident British bird, which apparently tags along with tits in autumn and winter. Not to be confused with the short-toed treecreeper (Certhia brachydactyla), which lives in the Channel Islands (presumably for tax purposes)

Ghost of a pigeon at your window

Have you ever seen a grey feathery, pigeon-shaped outline on a window? It’s usually left when a bird has somehow not seen the glass and attempted to fly through. If you’re in the room when it happens it can make a surprisingly loud thud but pigeons seem to crash land after the collision, look very stunned, ruffle their feathers and move on, But, what exactly is that grey powder that they leave behind on your window? It’s known as powder down.

Down feathers are fine feathers found under the tougher exterior feathers. Chicks usually have only down feathers until they grow their adult feathers. Powder down,Â or pulviplumes, is somewhat different and occurs in a few unrelated groups of birds – pigeons, tinamous, herons, and parrots, for instance. In some species, the tips of the pulviplume barbules break up into a fine powdery form of keratin, which forms a “feather dust” among the feathers. In others,Â powder grains are generated by cells that surround the barbules of growing feathers.

Powder down is a known allergen and is one of the causes of “bird fancier’s lung” and related conditions in people who keep or work with birds, includingÂ pigeons, parakeets, cockatiels, budgerigars, parrots, and turtle doves.

The above picture shows the imprint left by a woodpigeon that had slammed into my office window recently, cropped from the photo is the big smudge of powder down left by its body. You might also like to note that our window cleaner has not visited for quite some time.

Several other species produce powder down too, including notoriously, parrots, although you’re less likely to have a Mealy Amazon slam into a back bedroom window in East Anglia than a Wood Pigeon.