Biology – Page 60 – David Bradley

Coal tit photos – there’s an app for that

I’ve been hearing and catching occasional glimpses of a coal tit (Periparus ater) in our garden for several months. I have managed to get some awful snatched photos of it, but usually with its face turned away from the camera or flitting into the shrubage. Anyway, on a whim, I decided to put my camera on a tripod in the middle of the garden and point it out that mixed seed feed dangling from our beech tree, resplendent in its bronze winter plumage foliage.

I’d enabled Wi-Fi on the camera and went back indoors to a comfortable chair and fired up the EOS app on my phone, luckily the camera’s Wi-Fi signal was strong enough to cope with the distance between chilly tripod and comfortable armchair. No sooner had I sat down than the coal tit appeared by pure chance. So tapping away on the app, I grabbed a few before it darted back into the aforemention shrubage and did not re-emerge.

The coal tit eats insects, seeds, and nuts and will cache food to eat later. They’re well known as flocking with blue tits and great tits in winter woodland and gardens. We do have blue tits and great tits that visit our feeders but I’ve not seen any evidence of any of them flocking as such.

The New Bedford River

The New Bedford River is a near-straight drainage channel between Earith and Denver Sluices. It is also known as the Hundred Foot Drain because of the distance between the tops of the two embankments on either side of the river.

New Year’s Day 2018, one bank was cut short and you could only walk so far along it before you’re wading into the water. It happens every year, nothing unusual. The man-made cut-off, bypass, channel for the River Great Ouse in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, allows water from the land to drain into the sea (at The Wash). The drain itself is tidal and you can see the ebb and flow at Welney, which is more than 30 km from the coast.

There was lots of bird activity along the Drain: pied wagtail, grey wagtail, redwing, grey heron, starling, robin, coal tit, great tit, blue tit, long-tailed tit, chaffinch, meadow pipit, goldfinch, buzzard, wren, kestrel, mute swan, black-headed gull…

Green sandpiper confirmed

In mid-October I spotted a bird I didn’t recognise scooting along Cottenham Lode. It looked mostly black/very dark-brown but with a white rump and a square tail. It was a quick flyer shooting along the fen drain close to the water’s surface. I’d say it was just a little smaller than a swift and with a similarly sickle-shaped wing profile; but the swifts were long gone by this time of the year. I thought maybe it was a seabird, but that felt unusual we’re just outside Cambridge miles from the coast. Perhaps it was a migrant blown off course by the strong winds we called “ex-Ophelia” at the time. I didn’t get a photo.

Members of the RSPB forum had various suggestions, but it was my trusty ornithological mentor on Facebook, Brian Stone, who recognised it from the description and told me it was most likely a green sandpiper. I saw the same bird again a few nights ago, it was almost dark, but it was definitely the same species. I got a very noisy snap as it passed over a patch of light on the Lode.

I sent the picture to Brian who confirmed it, even from this awful photo, as a green sandpiper (Tringa ochropus). He pointed out that it’s a common visitor to the fen drains in winter, and on passage). The green sandpiper is a wader (a shorebird). It breeds across subarctic Europe and Asia and is a migratory bird, wintering in southern Europe, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and tropical Africa. It eats small invertebrates plucked from the shoreline mud. Almost uniquely for a wader it nests in trees although will often adopt a used thrush’s nest as its home.

According to the RSPB its call is a loud “tllu-eet weet-weet!”

What’s happening to our birds?

The RSPB/BTO/WWT state of the UK’s birds report is out now. Here’s the exec summary cribbed from the RSPB’s press release.

Climate change is helping some species, hindering others.
Bird abundance and distribution are changing, more reaching further north.
Some migratory birds are arriving earlier. Swallows get her two weeks sooner than they did in the 1960s.
Species that prefer warmer climes but don’t migrate are beginning to settle on our shores, e.g. little bittern and night heron. Garganey, quail, and little egret already on the increase.
Rare breeding birds, such as dotterel, whimbrel, common scoter, and Slavonian grebe, will be at greater risk of extinction in the UK as conditions change.
Sandeel numbers are down which means kittiwake population are declining. Will affect Arctic skua, Arctic tern, and puffin too.
National surveys show capercaillie and hen harriers down.

*Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, British Trust for Ornithology, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust

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.