35.8104 years in science communication
While we’re still allowed out of our homes for a period of exercise each day, have a listen out for some of the birds that are singing and calling right now, various migrants and others you may not have noticed above traffic noise even in the countryside previously:
Swallow
Whitethroat
Buzzard
Reed Bunting
Yellowhammer
Kingfisher
People often tell me they don’t know what that bird is they can hear singing or calling but cannot see. There’s an international crowd-sourced project called Xeno Canto that has the calls and songs of almost every bird around the world. But, for local friends and family who might want to know what they can hear in the gardens, here’s a small selection of some of the more likely in England:
Chaffinch
Greenfinch
Robin
Blackbird
Great Tit
Blue Tit
Dunnock
Wood Pigeon
Collared Dove
Starling
House Sparrow
Most of these birds will have a song and a call, some of them seem to improvise or do abbreviated versions of their songs and calls. The sound files you can listen to above are just a starting point for learning how to identify birds you might hear in your garden and then associate them with a visual ID.
Day-flying moths among the tops of the sycamores today
Adela reaumurella, the Green Long-horn Moth, is a species of moth belonging to the family Adelidae. It is a small moth with a wingspan of around 12-15 mm. The forewings are metallic green, the hindwings slightly darker. The most distinctive feature of this moth is the long antennae that can be twice as long as the wingspan. The Green Long-horn Moth is widely distributed throughout Europe and parts of Asia. It can be found in a variety of habitats, including woodlands, heathlands, and grasslands.
The species typically has two generations per year. The first generation emerges in May or June, and the second generation emerges in August or September. The larvae feed on leaf litter.
The species is not considered to be a threatened species. However, like many moth species, it is under-recorded and little is known about its population status. As with many Lepidoptera, it plays an important role in the ecosystem as a pollinator of flowers. It is also a valuable indicator species for monitoring the health of woodland habitats.
I have a pheromone lure to attract the male of the lepidopteral species Saturnia pavonia, also known as the Emperor moth. It’s a beautiful creature. The male flies during the day drawn to the sex attractant exuded by the night-flying and less brightly coloured female. I’ve photographed them on the wing in the garden previously and also on a stage with a macro lens, as regular Sciencebase readers will know.
I only put the lure out for a few moments once a week or so, but it never fails. A couple of males turned up today within 20 minutes of the pheromones being released. One of them ended up in the conservatory, frantically flapping on a curtain for a few moments, so I got some fast shutterspeed (1/4000s) shots of him before giving the curtain a bit of a gentle flick to send him on his way and putting the lure back in the freezer until next week. It’s wonderful to know that these beautiful creatures are going about their lives with no care for our human woes.
As regular Sciencebase readers will be well aware, I often work from my laptop in the garden in the summer time, when the weather is fine…I reach right up and grab a camera sometimes…
Showing well today, a rather bold Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, munching on grubs and caterpillars from various bushes and not worrying too much about my presence. I’ve been making efforts to let the garden go a bit wild, without it simply turning into a couch grass, thistle, and nestle patch. Lots of wildflower seeds are in, the pond is buzzing. Red Valerian and Green Alkanet are thriving, foxgloves are about to burst into bloom (hopefully). There are bird seed (mixed, sunflower, nyjer) and fat (suet) feeders aplenty.
Kingfishers at dawn…well…it wasn’t quite dawn. We awoke at about 7am had a cuppa and then headed out to a very local patch of waterway we know to see if we could spot the Kingfishers going about their business, all part of our once-daily exercise allowance under Covid-19 lockdown, social distancing, self-isolation rules.
We avoided touching any styles or fences, there were no other people around to avoid, apart from a farmer, just as we had finished our exercise. Anyway, combining photos from first thing last Sunday morning and today in this post
Fans of the Facebook page may have seen the various Live broadcasts I’ve done in the “Watch” series, all very tongue in cheek and an excuse for me to broadcast some of my music or offer some relaxing video – there’s been PondWatch, LawnWatch, FeederWatch, and the fascinating ShedWatch.
Today, I once more put my phone on a tripod and pointed it at a feeder hanging in our apple tree for SuetWatch. Robins, Erithacus rubecula, have been pecking at this all week. I hoped to catch them on video. I don’t think I did, but when I went to terminate the video I noticed for the first time a nest in an old homemade nest box hanging on the shed. I wondered whether it was the Robins, so pointed the phone camera there and stepped back so as not to disturb the birds.
A quick scan through the video revealed a Dunnock, Prunella modularis, sitting on top of it at one point, so perhaps most likely that bird’s nest rather than that of the Robin.
The footage is awful and the bird activity so brief I won’t bother posting it. But, do take a look at my Facebook as there will most likely be more in the Watch series coming soon…
Dave Bradley on Facebook here.
I mentioned noc migging at the end of last year as something I planned to do in the spring of 2020. “Nocmig” or Night flight call (NFC) recording as the Americans know it, is basically making an audio (or indeed video) recording of the sky above you at night with the aim of plucking from the audio the calls of birds flying overhead as they migrate.
We’re coming into the main migratory season in the UK with a few of our summer visitors already here, many more heading this way and crossing the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of the continent lying between their winter holiday homes further south and The British Isles. Of course, the wintering birds are also returning to their summer roosts and mating grounds further north, in the far reaches of Scotland, Scandinavia, Siberia, and The Arctic.
So…I just need to waterproof a microphone to stick out of the window and setup some audio recording software to run overnight. I’ll use my music software as it has lots of options for cleaning up the sound. With a “tape” in hand it can either be scrolled manually looking for bursts of sound in the waveform and these sampled out to be analysed spectrally or it fed into a second bit of software such as a spectrogram to filter out barking dogs and vehicles and other non-avian noises. Cornell University then has an app – Raven – that can take the cropped analysis and identify the birds from their calls in your recording.
I’ll keep you posted…
Thirty years ago this month I wrote my first professional article. It was a short feature about the biggest organism having the biggest orgasm and was entitled ‘The Barrier Method’. It explained some of the chemistry, biology, and geography of the sex life of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and appeared in the April 1990 issue of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s young chemists’ newsletter Gas Jar.
Incidentally, I later renamed the magazine and helped relaunch it in full colour as New Elements with Editor Dr Mandy Mackenzie, which carried my Elemental Discoveries news round-up for several years from 1995 onwards.
I also used to publish Elemental Discoveries online on what was perhaps the first chemistry news website. It was to become a model for several news site launches over the following years that I instigated or was involved with for various organisations, including Reactive Reports for ACD/Labs, PSIGate Spotlight, which became Intute, Spectral Lines (for Wiley, now SpectroscopyNOW.com), Distillates for the RSC magazine Education in Chemistry, and a couple of others. Elemental Discoveries itself was hosted by ChemDraw creators Cambridge Soft for a couple of years before I relaunched it as Sciencebase.com in July 1999.
The article ‘The Barrier Method’ was chosen as runner-up in the 1990 Young Science Writer Awards hosted by The Daily Telegraph and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. A later article entitled “Not every sperm is sacred” won in 1991 and led to my writing about science for The Telegraph for several years after that. I got a merit award after the sperm and eggs with an article about xenon and anaesthesia, but sex science has remained a focus of much of my writing over the years, hah!
You can see a hopefully complete list of all my clients from the last thirty years as a freelance science writer here.
The photo accompanying the article was by Mrs Sciencebase long before she was Mrs Sciencebase. I can’t find the original magazine, hence the monochrome copy.
Back in the pre-covid good old days, when you could take a countryside or woodland walk and chat to others on the highways and byways, the conversation would almost always turn to birds, especially if one of you were carrying a set of bins or a camera with a big lens.
If you reveal any sort of knowledge about which bird is which, people are even more surprised if you know which call or song you can here. I’ve not counted how many birds I recognise from their songs and calls but a few of the ones I know for definite would be: Blackbird, Robin, Dunnock, Wren, Song and Mistle Thrush, Magpie, Jay, Rook, Raven, Carrion Crow, Jackdaw, Blue, Great, and Long-tailed Tit, Buzzard, Goldcrest, Treecreeper, Yellowhammer, White Throat, Black Cap, Chiff Chaff, Reed Warbler, Reed Bunting, Bearded Reedling, Green and Great Spotted Woodpecker…I’ll stop now…
Anyway, there’s a crowdsourced website called Xeno-Canto where you can hear recordings of the calls and songs of birds from around the world.
But, as we’re all at home now, here’s a selection you might hear from an open window in your self-isolation.
Blackbird – song, alarm call
Song Thrush – song
Wren – song
Great Tit – song
Chiffchaff – song
You can find the complete tick list for our garden birding here.