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Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 20: Hawfinch

I sometimes dream about birds. Particularly, I dream about rare birds turning up suddenly in my garden.

And my subconscious aims high; I dream about mixed flocks of parrots and hornbills which, in dream-logic, have been caught up in some extraordinary freak weather system and blown from all corners of the world to turn up together in suburban London.

These are nice dreams, I suppose, but they also carry a whiff of anxiety. The panicky feeling of trying to find and positively identify an exciting new bird, which, being a bird, is liable to fly away.

I remember three birds from last night. There was some kind of pipit with a yellow flush along each side of a strongly streaked breast. There was a large, black and white booby which was flying against a window with the mechanical aimlessness of a badly-programmed computer game character that reaches a wall and just keeps walking on the spot. And there was one identifiable species; a hawfinch:

A booby turning up in my garden would be preposterous. A hawfinch would just be staggeringly unlikely; they do breed in Britain, and they clearly come to birdtables in some places:

Look at that beak, big enough to crack open cherry stones. What a bird.

» Hawfinch is © Andreas Øverland and used under the CC Attribution licence. Hawfinch 3 is © Max Westby and used under the CC by-nc-sa licence.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 19: Magpie Shrike

Just a quickie, since I’m catching up with myself; the Magpie Shrike:

» The 3 watchers, © Marc Dezemery, is used under the CC by-nc-nd licence.

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Housekeeping

Something went wrong with my WordPress upgrade, and I was still trying to sort it out when my computer died, and that took several hours to rescue (and involved reformatting the hard drive, reinstalling the system and restoring my files from a backup)… so I still haven’t sorted this blog yet. I don’t have access to the admin pages. If you’re reading this it means I’ve managed to post via the iPhone app, but the advent calendar is on hold for the moment. What larks.

EDIT: well, the good news is that I can get back into the admin area of the blog, the bad news is that I didn’t wait and check plugin compatibility properly, and one of the key plugins I use, Simple Tags, is currently borked. Hence the error message below. But I think sorting that out can wait until tomorrow.

EDIT: the Simple Tags problem solved! Yay! After about 20 hours of doing my own tech support, I’m almost back to where I was yesterday at lunchtime.

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Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 18: Short-eared Owl

I had to have an owl for one of these entries, because let’s face it, everyone loves owls. So here is the Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus.

The Short-Eared Owl Is one of the most widely distributed species of bird in the world; it’s found on all continents apart from Australia and Antarctica. There are even endemic subspecies on both Hawaii and the Galapagos. These four photos were taken in British Columbia, Iceland, the Galapagos and California respectively.

There’s something slightly mysterious about these species which have incredibly wide natural distributions: Short-eared Owl, Barn Owl, Peregrine Falcon, Osprey, Mallard. I mean: why them? Obviously they have to be adaptable species, but even that just invites the question: what makes them so much more adaptable than other species?

For example: there are about 30 native duck species in Europe. What is it about the mallard that makes it so much more adaptable, so that while other species are dependent on specialised habitats and need to be the subject of careful conservation programs, the mallard just cheerfully takes up residence on any old bit of urban canal or garden pond?

It’s not surprising that when new, manmade habitats appear, like parks and gardens, some species should be quicker to adapt to them, perhaps because they somewhat resemble some wild habitat; so House Martins, which were once cliff-nesters, adapted easily to nesting on buildings. They were moving into an open niche. But presumably that wasn’t true for the Short-eared Owl. So what’s their secret?

» Photo credits, from top down: Short-eared Owl, © Rick Leche and used under the CC by-nc-nd licence. Fighting Owls, © Árdís and used under the CC by-nc-sa licence. Short-eared owl on Genovesa island, © Petr Kosina and used under the CC by-nc-sa licence. Short Eared Owl (Asio flammeus), © leftrightworld and used under the CC by licence.