Soggy in the Name of Education

A sharp wind gusted, tugging at the edges of a gazebo, rustling through the leaves on the splendid oak tree above. The grassy heath rippled, shades of greens, yellows and browns shimmering like waves that rolled across the open field. The sky above darkened, a rumble in the distance and the heavens opened. The torrent began; huge, fat rain drops that soaked you to the skin even under the shelter of the trees, splashing onto leaves and bending the heads of nettles, flowers and grasses.

The downpour was brief, patches of blue sky soon appeared and the sun burst through the clouds, sending rainbows through the droplets dripping onto the gazebo and the soaked ringers now sheltering beneath. Hoping that the wonderful summer weather had not put off too many people, or birds for that matter, from venturing out the mist nets were opened and the event celebrating the nature of the Breckland region began.

The soggy ringing demo team with the first bird of the day
(a dry blackbird!)

The ‘Wild About the Brecks’ event on Barnham Cross Common in Thetford had storytellers, mini beast hunting, art and craft activities and a bird ringing demonstration. Although all rather soggy the volunteers persevered and some members of the public braved the weather to build nest boxes, bug homes and bird feeders, and if they were lucky get up close to a bird…

If the weather was not always on our side, the birds certainly were! Although 19 birds may not sound like a lot, given the weather and the fact the site is not usually ringed, it was certainly enough to keep us busy and the public enthralled. Once again the corvids stole the show, with the highlights being a feisty but beautiful jay and a young magpie.

Showing beautiful wing of a feisty jay

Iridescent greens, purples and blues shimmer in the black feathers and contrast starkly with patches of brilliant white, making the magpie a subtly beautiful bird, which few people expect. Their highly intelligent nature means we rarely catch them in mist nets as they figure out those tricks quickly. A jack of all trades, with a cheeky nature for thieving bright objects, magpies have been much maligned and often incorrectly blamed for the decline of garden birds.

For me, this beautiful, intelligent bird must also surely have its place in the grand scheme of things….

Very happy with my first ringed magpie!

From Brussels With Love

The goldfinch is one of Britain’s prettiest birds. Their striking bright red, black and white faces, plus a flash of brilliant yellow on black wings gives this bird a tropical appearance… its seem they would be right at home in a tropical jungle or an exotic island somewhere. But no this beautiful finch breeds across Europe, and in the UK there are something like 313,000 breeding territories (BTO Bird Trends).

The beautiful goldfinch

Goldfinches are partial migrants, which means that  part of the population will migrate while the rest over winter in the UK. Those that do migrate tend to head south to south-west to the continent, not to any specific wintering areas but stopping when they find suitable feeding locations.

Ringing provides invaluable information on the movements of birds, both within the country and between countries, and it is every ringers dream to catch a bird with a foreign ring on. After ringing in the garden in Garth, Wales for the past four years and catching over 160 goldfinch, we finally caught one with a ring we had not put on ourselves! More than that it wasn’t even put on in this country! Ring number 11300397 had a Brussels address on. This goldfinch, at some point in its life, had been caught and ringed in Belgium and then flew east across the southern North Sea and England to our garden in Wales.

You can just about make out Brussels on the ring!

In over one hundred years of ringing, 92 goldfinch ringed in Great Britain and Ireland have been found in Belgium, not that many when you consider 426, 657 goldfinch have been ringed between 1909 and 2011. Even more impressive is that until 2011 only 15 goldfinch have been ringed in Belgium and then caught in Great Britain… ours makes number 16!

Where in Belgium or when we will not know until the recovery has been submitted to the Belgium ringing scheme…. but it is still exciting to think just where this bird has been. Watch this space for an update in the coming weeks.

A very happy Lee with the Belgium ringed goldfinch

Wanderings in a Welsh Woodland

High above the River Dee, snaking its way through the steep sided valleys of the North Wales landscape, small pockets of oak woodland nestle amongst green open pastures, dotted with white sheep. Higher still and the green pastures and woodlands turn to the browns and reds of the moors. In this part of the valley grey sheer, rock faces stand sentry overlooking and the skeletal remains of a castle crown the top of a hill which stands away from the slopes in the middle of the valley.

During the summer months these woodlands provide a breeding space for a number of migrant birds. Arriving to make the most of our summer and the abundance of insect food it provides. Two characteristic species of summer, mature oak woodlands are the redstart and pied flycatcher. Their preference for such woodlands means they are more often found in western parts of the UK where such habitat remains.

Beautiful female pied flycatcher

Like many UK birds these species have suffered a decline in numbers over the last few years, in part due to the loss of breeding and overwintering habitat but also due to climate change. Recent research with pied flycatchers indicates there is an increasing mismatch between the timing of peak caterpillar abundance and the period when chicks require the most food.

Such research has relied on projects looking at the breeding success of these birds, aided by the fact they readily take to nest boxes. The pied flycatcher is one of the best studied migrants, with many long term projects having been run since the 1970s. One such study has been undertaken in the woodlands above the town of Llangollen, and it was here we headed to help check the boxes.

Loaded with a ladder, a note book and some ringing kit, we picked our way through the trees, climbing the slopes carpeted with crinkly brown leaves, sleek, shiny green bluebell leaves and dead, crumbling branches. Each box was checked, the contents recorded and if possible the adult bird and chicks ringed.

Pied flycatcher nest - lovely blue eggs with a neat nest with oak leaves

Redstart nest - slightly darker blue eggs and also note the number of feathers
woven into the nest also

 In total we checked over 70 nest boxes, although there were many empty boxes and most of the occupied ones had blue tits in, we did come across a number of pied flycatcher and redstart broods. Of these we managed to ring nine broods of blue tit, two broods of pied flycatcher and three broods of redstart. We also caught five adult female pied flycatchers. A rewarding days wandering around a beautiful woodland in Wales. 

Pied flycatcher brood freshly ringed and returned to their nest

Rather scruffy though still beautiful redstart chick

Something to 'Crow' About

The sun blazed in a bright blue sky, the garden bloomed under its warmth, vibrant greens with splashes of brilliant colour, the pond shimmering silvery blue…finally some sunshine, some heat to the spring.

The net was up, but with the bright light very few birds were falling for that trick. One group of bird that rarely falls for any kind of trap are the corvids, a cosmopolitan group of birds that includes crow, jays, ravens, magpies and jackdaws. They are considered amongst the most intelligent birds, even some of the most intelligent of all animals having shown self awareness, counting and tool use. Of this group we most often catch Jays, but the other corvids rarely fall for mist nets or traps that we predominantly use to catch birds.

On this bright sunny day however things were different, the temptation of food and the pressures of feeding young was overriding the caution of a net. A flurry of black, the net bounces and there lying in the pocket was a small black crow with a distinctive silver sheen to the back of the head and a piercing pale eye, a Jackdaw!

A stunning Jackdaw!

With the Jackdaw released and back chattering noisily, things again quietened down in the garden… that is until another large bird bounced into the net. This time it was a carrion crow! A large forbidding looking bird, with glossy, black feathers, dark eye and thick bill, this intelligent bird is one of the most adaptable and cleverest of all.

Cracking Carrion Crow

Within the county of Clwyd, North Wales very few carrion crows are ringed each year, with none ringed in 2011 and only two in 2010! As for Jackdaws around 15-20 adult birds are ringed each year within the county… as such a more than unusual catch for this garden and region!

No messin'

Raar!

A King in the Reed Bed

It's not easy getting up at 4am, especially when you know you have a full day of work ahead of you. But the weather waits for no one, and the next constant effort site (CES) ringing session at Cranwich needed to be done.

Although cool for May, the weather conditions were perfect for ringing, overcast and calm. The session proved to be a busy one, with 54 birds in total caught including 28 reed warblers our focal species. However the best bird of the session was a beautiful male kingfisher.

Beautiful adult male kingfisher

Although widespread particularly through central and southern England, the kingfisher is listed as Amber on the Birds of Conservation Concern list. This list reviews the population status of birds regularly found in the UK, Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Seven quantitative criteria are used to asses the population status of each species, and each is placed on either a red, amber or green list.

The kingfisher is vulnerable to hard winters and habitat degradation through pollution and unsympathetic management of waterways, and is listed as amber due to its unfavourable conservation status in Europe.

Despite this there are still over 5000 breeding pairs in the UK and Ireland, and their flash of brilliant blue can often be glimpsed racing down a river. We don’t too many kingfishers at our sites and each time we do it’s a real treat!

Happy Rachael, the kingfisher and Barley!

A Quest for Adventure

Organisation Cetacea (ORCA) is a UK based marine charity dedicated to surveying and protecting whales, dolphins and porpoises (cetaceans) in north east European waters. Started in 2000, the charity has two aims, the first to collect sightings data on cetaceans and the second to raise awareness of these incredible animals, the threats they face and what is being done to protect them. Scientific surveys are conducted by volunteers on ferry routes from the UK once a month, with Wildlife Officers present on two routes during the summer. 

The M.V. Quest for Adventure 

Since 2007 these have been supplemented by surveys conducted on the cruise ship the Spirit of Adventure, with teams heading out on trips up to Scandinavia and Iceland, around the British Isles and down into the Mediterranean. In 2012 a new chapter to this story began, with teams now being placed aboard the Quest for Adventure. The inaugural cruise to Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland took place in May, with Lee and I on board as the survey team.

Weather conditions ranged from wet to sunny and sea states of a flat calm Force 0 to a wild Force 8, gusting to 50 knots, fortunately while we were in harbour! The ship headed out from Southampton, to Dublin, then to Londonderry, on to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, and back down to Douglas on the Isle of Man. From there we travelled to Cork, onto St Peter Port on Guernsey and finally back into Dover.

Whilst we did not perhaps pick up as many sightings  as we had hoped, with our efforts around Mull and the Isle of Man hampered by choppy seas, we did have seven sightings of harbour porpoise, one brief sighting of two common dolphins and a sighting of three bottlenose dolphin.

Harbour porpoise

In the meanwhile there were plenty of birds to keep us entertained, including a white-tailed eagle on Mull, whooper swans heading away from Londonderry and whimbrel flying over the Solent as well as feeding along the shoreline on the Isle of Man. Seabirds abounded, with the usual suspects including manx shearwaters, gannets, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and ‘terns’ dashing across our bow. Another highlight was the black guillemots, dazzling with their beautiful black plumage, white wing patches and bright red legs.

Black guillemot

Although a tiring trip with just the two of us, we did speak with a lot of people, saw some wonderful places and caught up with friends at Sea Life Surveys who gave us a delightful, if rather damp trip out of Tobermory which produced the eagle sighting and an inquisitively close harbour porpoise. 

Back to the reed bed

After days of rain, grey skies and general dampness, Monday dawned on a clear, pale blue sky, streaks of washed out pinkish orange hinting where that elusive sun would appear. The reed bed at Cranwich was brimming with water, fuller than it had been in a long time. Straw coloured reeds with fresh green shoots glowed in the morning sunshine; trees, the limbs now filling out with new green leaves, swayed over the deep, murky water.

The site is a series of old gravel pits, the excavated areas having filled with water, reeds, trees and bushes. The reeds fill the edges of these pools, fringes encircling the water and between them runs a network of paths, land bridges, now soggy and muddy from the rain. 

Cranwich reed bed 

Here a dedicated (some may call crazy) group of us run a constant effort site (CES) and a reed warbler project. The CES means we set up and run the same nets, for the same amount of time at 12 day intervals throughout the spring and summer. Standardising the ringing in this way means we can calculate changes in bird populations. The reed warbler project started in 2010 and aims to find and monitor reed warbler nests within the site in order to assess breeding success and, along with the mist netting, dispersal of young.  

Although one CES session had already been run in mid-April, at that point the reed warblers had not yet returned. With reports springing up around us of birds being back, it was time for the second visit.

As Monday morning progressed it was not just us moving around the reed bed, sloshing through the water in our waders and wellies…swifts and cuckoos had returned to the skies,  birds of all kinds were singing in the reeds and surrounding woodland, and there in our nets sedge, garden and….reed warblers! They were back…time for the carnage of a summer nesting in a reed bed to begin once more…

The focus of our nesting project...
the reed warbler