Category: Biology

UPDATE: The robin and the blue tit both feature in my free 10-bird ebook sampler “Chasing Wild Geese”. Send me an email [email protected] to get the link for the PDF.

Well, the blue tits didn’t settle in our birdbox, but a family of robins (Erithacus rubecula) set up home in some ivy on the fence at the rear of the garden. The chicks have been making their high-pitched “feed me now” tweets for a few days. Just now, noticed one on the lawn with two parents in frequent attendance. They’re fast moving and in the shade so quite hard to get a sharp photo, but here goes. One of the chick alone and another post-prandial with parent.

Robins used to be classed as part of the thrush family, Turdidae, but they have been reclassified as chats (old world flycatchers). The American robin is definitely still a thrush though Turdus migratorius and strikingly different to the European robin, but both have the famous “red” breast, which is, of course, orange, because there was no word for that colour until the 16th century (hence redhead, red shank, red admiral, all prominently orange!); we had the fruit by 1300 but didn’t call the colour orange until much later.

The courtship ritual of the Dunnock (Prunella modularis) is peculiar. I observed a pair on the lawn in our garden last week while I was sitting at the garden table working at my laptop. The female had raised her tail feathers and was fluttering them up and down rapidly while the male pecked repeatedly at her rear end, well her cloaca to be more specific. It went on for a minute or two until they both flew up quickly into a hedge, presumably to mate.

It’s not a ritual I’d observed before and Googled the bird to discover that female dunnocks are quite promiscuous. The pecking of the cloaca by the male is thought to stimulate rejection of sperm from a previous male’s mating and so increase the chances of the new mate fathering her offspring.

In my garden observations I could have sworn I could see something curved and white protruding from the female, an egg, perhaps. So maybe the male’s pecking stimulates her to lay an egg outside the nest before he takes her back to mate. Either way, it’s apparently not an entirely efficient paternity-assurance strategy as genetic testing of dunnock broods has revealed that the female can lay eggs fertilised by several males.

I only had my phone to hand so this is awful footage and the voyeuristic blackbird is a distraction.

Apparently, puffins prefer to be deeper into rocky crevices on coastal cliff faces than razorbills (and guillemots) who cling to the edges. The puffin then has to wait until those other birds fly off, before it can get away itself to feed and socialise.

Sheer coincidence that we were visiting the East Riding of Yorkshire last week when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) opened its new visitor centre at Bempton Cliffs. We approached the reserve on two walks first from North Landing on Flamborough Head where I photographed coble fishers landing and unloading their boat and then from the village of Speeton with its tiny Anglo-Saxon church (St Leonard’s and its flock of rarebreed Leicester Longwool sheep).

Bempton Cliffs plays host to England’s largest nesting colony of Northern Gannets (Sula bassana), graceful and quiet in flight and far more beautiful than their rather ugly name. The cliffs also host countless kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, fulmars and puffins as well as pigeons, rooks and herring gulls.

Carl Zimmer offered some insights at TED-Ed into how dinosaurs got their plumage and evolved into the flying birds, excellent birds, we see today. This is witty animation plucks up the courage to fill in the gaps.

On an entirely unrelated note, I wrote a song about flight, which you can hear on my SoundCloud page or via my Songs, Snaps and Science site.