Category: Biology

Scopelessly in love with birds

I’ve always had a soft spot for our feathered friends. After all, they’re the great British wildlife that seems the most abundant and most accessible. There are more birds and more bird species than there are large wild mammals and domesticated animals put together, by a long way. If you start counting the latter: fox, badger, hare, rabbit, stoat, weasel, bank vole, red deer, roe deer, fallow deer, muntjac, cow, sheep, goat, dog, cat etc you quickly come to a halt.

But, start listing the birds and the list goes on and on from Barn Owl and Barn Swallow to Pied Flycatcher and Pied Wagtail, Firecrest to Goldcrest, Crested Tit to Great-crested Grebe. And, don’t forget all those warblers: Barred, Bonelli’s, Cetti’s, Dartford, Fan-tailed, Garden, Grasshopper, Great Reed, Icterine, Marsh, Melodious, Moustached, Reed, Sardinian, Savi’s, Sedge, Subalpine, Western Bonelli’s, Willow, and Wood.

I never took birdwatching too seriously. I was certainly never a twitcher chasing around hill and vale, coast and cove. I was happy to see a new bird, but never jotted down details, never ticked it off in a book.

Superzoom

That changed when superzoom lenses got cheaper. I had a few snaps of birds taken with a small zoom lens, but the purchase of an affordable 150-600mm lens brought the whole world closer. Especially useful for photographing the moon, the ISS or comets in the night skies. Of course, the lens might otherwise be redundant during daylight if it wasn’t for the birds. Birds, I assume have absolutely no concept of just how close you can be through such a lens without really disturbing them.

 

Twitching or birding?

And so, my latent twitching/birding inclinations began to grow early in 2017. I had a lucky first day with the new lens: flighty blue tits in the garden and a sharp-eyed heron after our neighbours’ goldfish in the pond. Lucky for those pesky piscines, our neighbour had protected them from such aquatic hunters with strong wire mesh. I got a nice close of the frustrated bird up from an upstairs window before he lumbered into the air to find breakfast elsewhere. My first lunchtime dog walk in the winter sun, led me to a majestic Kingfisher perched on the reeds. I’d spotted her once or twice before on walks without a camera. This time, she posed for a moment while I got her close-up all electric blue and saturated orange.

I started to blog about the birds and to build an online gallery. Trips to local nature reserves and country houses added more to the list as did trips to the coast. Before long, I had more than 100 different species: Red Kites, Marsh Harriers, Hobbies, Blackcaps, Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Green Woodpeckers, House Martins, House Sparrows, Tree Sparrows, Dunnocks, Gannets, Kittiwakes, Puffins, Razorbills, Bullfinch, Greenfinch, Chaffinch, and so many more.

Who’s counting?

Birders will tell you that identifying your first 100 is just the start, it gets serious and harder when you are targeting 250. So, here’s a selection of the first few birds you might see should you take up the sport and science of observing birds. Your mileage may vary, you might see a marsh harrier before you spot a Hen Harrier, and Ringed Plovers may come your way before Golden Plovers. You may also try to count Lapwings, Peewits, and Green Plovers as different species, but they are one and the same.

In less enlightened times people preferred to shoot birds with a gun and steal their eggs. But, with a camera, you get to hunt and shoot the same bird again and again. I hope this short guide gives you some clues as to what you might look out for and where you might look in figuratively bagging your first 100 birds.

There are plenty of birds to watch…about ten thousand species worldwide at the last count. So crack out the binoculars and your walking boots or just watch from your garden and maybe tick them off in your head after you confirm the species in the books. It’s not a wild goose chase, honest.

I keep a constantly updated gallery of bird photos on my Imaging Storm site, along with a “tick list”.

…always escaping to the coast when we can, headed up the A10 (not quite as the crow flies, as we were in a car), took almost as long to get around King’s Lynn north to Snettisham as it had from here to King’s Lynn. Not to worry, we made it by midday. We’d missed the high tide turning, although I could’ve sworn the site’s website said that was just close to 11:20 am not the 10 am that it seems to have been, so the water was way out and the mudflats exposed. Not a huge variety of birds nor large numbers on the day, but we got there at the wrong time of day and at the wrong part of the tide. There were vast flocks of black-tailed godwits and knot on the horizon. A few oystercatchers, ringed plover, turnstones, and sandpipers.

Finally got a snap of a curlew, in fact, there was an adult and a juvenile feeding on the mud.

Overhead lots of common tern heading out to see and back again to feed their chicks on the islands in the lagoons behind the flood bank and out of sight of the mudflats. Several grey wagtails and pied (white) wagtails around, and a few linnets, and the inevitable LBJs. Plenty of lapwings, cormorants, and greylag geese on the lagoons. Don’t think we spotted any of the pink-footed geese for which Snettisham is renowned at certain times of year with their spectacular flocking activities as the tide rises.

Mrs Sciencebase spotted a tern bearing a silvery fish in its beak and it was quite close so got a half decent shot of that bird and some of the adults fed chicks on a more distant island. Here are a few of the very active common terns (Sterna hirundo), known to some people as sea swallows. And having watched so many birds feasting on seafood, we headed to the local fryer and had cod and chips for a very late lunch…

I’ve been on photo site/community 500px for years but only this year, with my focus on birds have I really got into the community. There are some stunning photos on there. And, it’s very gratifying to have one’s own photos seen and “liked”, of course. Here’s a contact sheet of my most popular snaps, all of which have had above a 95/100 pulse and a goodly proportion of likes from those that view them. In the array top row to bottom, left to right:

 

Sedge warbler | Female great crested grebe

Pectoral sandpiper | Avocets | Teasels | Common Kingfisher

Grey heron | Juvenile greylag goose | Female moorhen | Green woodpecker

Obviously, not all the photos I post on 500px are of birds, the vast majority are, but many of the insects, plants, landscapes and others do quite well, and in this case, the blooming teasels outstrip many of the avians. In my galleries at the time of writing: 92 bird photos, 43 general nature, 29 architecture, 18 flowers, 13 Misc.

Often the way, you’re looking for one bird, when you hear and then spot another. Happens a lot with the yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella). Today, I was walking a short distance along the Aldreth Causeway and could hear avian jostling over the floodbank, scrambled to the top, saw nothing but flittering wings heading into the scrub, turned around and encountered this yella fella, sitting among the seed heads, not twenty feet from where I stood, making his call…

It’s distinctive call, Mrs Sciencebase’s Dad always told her, sounds like the bird was passing out the post-war rations: “two-slices-of-bread-but-no-cheeeeese” (Story No. 237). But, Richard Smyth, my E&T stablemate, also shows his age in his book A Sweet Wild Note by suggesting it’s more of a “chika-chika-chika-chikaaaah”. It sounds very similar to the pine bunting with which it interbreeds and like a different avian dialect version of the reed bunting’s call. Either way the yellowhammer is a lemon-coloured bunting and definitely not a canary as one fellow dogwalker insisted!

The hammer part of its name comes from the German word for bunting, ammer, first recorded in 1553 as yelambre. Oddly enough the “Emberiza” part of its scientific binomial (the name a lot of people refer to as an organism’s “Latin name”) also comes from the Old German embritz, meaning bunting. Citrinella is an Italian word for a small yellow bird.

I got reasonably close to this male yellowhammer and perhaps captured the best few shots of this species I have taken to add to my bird gallery.

A pair of hobbies (Falco subbuteo) took up residence in an abandoned rook’s nest at “The Lodge” RSPB reserve some time ago. They hatched three chicks which are thriving and providing hours of entertainment for birdwatchers and staff at the reserve.

It’s probably another week before they fledge. Their diet seems to consist of mainly dragonflies from the moorish land around their lonesome pine although one photographer (Colin Severs) I met had footage of an adult tearing apart a swallow (Hirundo rustica) on a branch near the nest to make bite-sized nuggets for the offspring.

These birds are spectacular enough to have made it worth the trip to the reserve but there were also several buzzards (Buteo buteo) around including at least one juvenile, green woodpeckers (Picus viridis), common whitethroats (Sylvia communis), the family of bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) purportedly also nesting near the hobbies remained elusive.

Also remaining hidden were the nuthatches (Sitta europaea) and treecreepers (Certhia familiaris). Apparently, a pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) that had been showing well was predated last, perhaps by a jay (Garrulus glandarius). I’ve only ever seen one of these birds, dead on a footpath, many years years ago. Attending the birdfeeders around the site were blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), dunnocks (Prunella modularis), chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs), blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) with young and great tits (Parus major), and a solitary robin (Erithacus rubecula) and a lone magpie (Pica pica).

Evening dog walk in and around Rampton Spinney, pair of bullfinches (only one photographed), willow warblers, long-tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, and robins, all with juveniles. Reed warblers, reed buntings and whitethroats on the Cottenham Lode. Song thrushes in song, wood pigeons (obvs), yaffles (heard not seen), great spotted woodpeckers (seen my Mrs Sciencebase), blackbirds seen and heard, but blackcaps (maybe not even heard)…

The pectoral sandpiper (Calidris melanotos) is a migratory wading bird that breeds in North America and Asia, winters in South America and the South Pacific, but also spends time in Siberia. However, you can see them in the UK and Europe. They’re often caught on Westerly winds and hit the British Isles from North America and on Easterlies that bring them in from Siberia.

Most commonly, they’ll be seen in late summer and autumn. There were quite a few on the wetlands at RSPB Titchwell in North Norfolk when we visited in mid-July. According to the RSPB, “It is the most common North American wading bird to occur here and has even started to breed in Scotland very recently.”

The sandpiper name refers to its call and to its shoreline existence while the pectoral refers to the bird’s brown breast band. The scientific binomial is from ancient Greek: kalidris or skalidris was a term used by Aristotle to refer to some grey-coloured waterside birds while melanotos is from melas meaning black and notos meaning backed.

Originally, in this post, I’d displayed a photo I took of what I assumed was the Pec Sand, but on later inspection turned out to be a Ruff, so I’ve removed the photo.

Eurasian magpies (Pica pica) obviously have a special place in the heart of any Geordie, their black and white plumage with a hint of blue being the football strip colours of Newcastle United, obviously.

The birds’ reputation as thieving magpies is misplaced, although like most corvids (crows), the bird is attracted to objects such as coins and buttons which it might use to decorate its nest or simply collect because they imagine such objects are seeds.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, corvid cognition is much higher than one might anticipate based on brain structure of these descendents of the dinosaurs. Crows seem to be far more intelligent than our understanding of the brain based on mammalian biology (think clever rats and monkeys) suggests. The same also applies to parrots and related species and perhaps all birds.

These photos were snapped of a juvenile on one of the jetties overlooking an old gravel pit pond at Milton Country Park north of Cambridge. The bird was stood on the fence and started doing his song and dance routine when he saw us and the dog. It was a bright, but fairly grey day and his bright white and deep black means getting light readings and setting bracketing for a decent shot before he flew off was next to impossible. I quickly fired off as he squealed and flapped and then nudged the levels in the photos to get the most dramatic tones.

Incidentally, my reference to them being shy is that usually adults out in the countryside will take to the air and head for the middle distance or the nearest trees almost as soon as they see you, which is often before you see them. This youngster was in a relatively busy area and maybe hadn’t yet learned to recognise the risk of dogs and humans.