Category: Nature

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Nature

Exotic birds (ooh err matron)

Richmond Park laid on a feast of introduced bird species yesterday. By far the most visible were the bazillions of ring-necked parakeets screeching from every tree, but there seemed to be Mandarin ducks on every patch of water and I also saw about half-a-dozen pairs of Egyptian geese as well as the usual Canada geese. And my two best birds of the day were red kite, which is a native species but the subject of a reintroduction program using Swedish birds, and little owl, which oddly enough was introduced from Holland in the nineteenth century.

The subject of exotic species seems to provoke an unexpectedly strong reaction in some people. It reminds me a bit of the pro-songbird lobby, whose campaigns are built around a message of ‘let’s kill all the sparrowhawks/squirrels/magpies’ and who complain that the RSPB only seems to be interested in protecting the ‘nasty birds’ and not the ‘nice birds’.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a good reason why conservationists worry about the impact of introduced species: there’s a litany of disastrous examples from the past, like rabbits and cane toads in Australia, snakes in Guam, and rats, pigs and goats on oceanic islands all over the world. And the best known British example, grey squirrels replacing the native red squirrel. But there’s something slightly creepy about the hostility which people aim at these animals which, after all, didn’t choose to come here.

There’s an obvious glib comparison to the hostility towards human immigrants, but I don’t know if it’s really very valid… perhaps there’s an emotional similarity, even if there’s not necessarily an overlap of the people involved.

» ‘Not just a pretty face‘ © Keven Law and used under a CC by-sa licence.

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Nature

Proper summer visitor news!

I noticed someone had uploaded some photos of Lesser Spotted Woodpecker to Flickr which were taken in ‘Bushy Park, London’. It turns out to be the Royal deer park next to Hampton Court Palace, so I thought I’d check it out. I didn’t have much luck with the woodpeckers — some Great Spotted, loads of yaffling Green, but no Lesser Spotted.

But there were skylarks singing, a chiffchaff doing some half-hearted chiffing and chaffing, and my first proper summer bird of the year, Northern Wheatear, Oenanthe oenanthe:

Not my photo, btw; this picture is from Iceland (© Ómar Runólfsson and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence). I did try the iPhone and binoculars trick but I wasn’t really close enough. I don’t wish to boast, but my birds were even more attractive than that one; two absolutely pristine males looking gorgeous.

The reason I say ‘proper’ summer bird is that the stonechat from a few days ago is a bit of a borderline case: some European populations are migratory, but others, including most British stonechats, are not. The specific individual I saw was presumably migrating, because there’s no other way one would turn up in a garden in south London. Perhaps it was a Swedish bird heading back after spending the winter in Spain. But you can see stonechats here in winter.

The wheatear, though, is a proper summer visitor, passing through London on its way back from Africa. In fact they have one of the most remarkable migrations of all. It’s impressive that a small bird should migrate from Sub-Saharan Africa to England, but that’s just the start: some of them carry on not just to Iceland but across the Atlantic to Greenland and Eastern Canada. Meanwhile, they also breed in Northern Asia, all the way around to Alaska, and those birds also migrate to Africa for the winter, crossing the whole of Asia to do it.

And every schoolboy birdwatchers’ favourite fact about wheatears: the name comes from the Anglo Saxon hwit aers: that is, ‘white arse’. And they do indeed flash a big white rump when they fly.

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Nature

Hot migrant bird news!

In the garden this afternoon, a female stonechat, captured here via the magic of holding my iPhone up to a pair of binoculars:

It doesn’t look like much, especially compared to the summer males, which are positively glamorous, but it’s a pretty good sighting for south London and a patch tick for me.

Interestingly a couple of other London birders who are on Twitter also had stonechats today — there was one at Wormwood Scrubs this morning and another at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. So they are obviously passing through at the moment. It’s an unexpected benefit of Twitter, for me, the way it acts as a kind of antenna for bird movements and the changing seasons; I haven’t seen my own first butterfly of the season, but I have seen one on someone else’s twitter feed…

EDIT: and a very handsome male in Regent’s Park, as well.

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Nature

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2010

That time of year again, the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, one of the world’s biggest exercises in citizen science. The usual drill: one hour of birding in the garden, with the counts being the maximum seen at one time.

  • blue tit × 3
  • great tit × 2
  • coal tit
  • long-tailed tit
  • chaffinch × 3
  • goldfinch
  • woodpigeon × 2
  • pigeon × 4
  • magpie × 3
  • blackbird × 3
  • song thrush
  • robin
  • dunnock × 2
  • ring-necked parakeet × 3
  • sparrowhawk

There’s a few fairly regular visitors missing; greenfinch, jay, great-spotted woodpecker, goldcrest, nuthatch. But on balance think it’s a pretty decent list.

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Nature

Bird of the Year 2009

Starting with the trainspotter-y listing details: I added three birds to my patch list and three to my British list, one of which was a lifer. Really, that’s not a very good score; I got two lifers and a patch tick in the first week of 2010. But the year had a few highlights nonetheless.

The patch ticks were all in Dulwich Park. One was a fieldfare which turned up when it was snowy in February, which was pleasing but if anything slightly overdue.

There was also a peregrine falcon I spotted flying high overhead in March, which wasn’t actually the first time I saw a peregrine in Dulwich Park; it’s just that the first time, many years ago, what I’d actually seen was a pigeon from a funny angle. It was only a fraction of a second before my conscious brain kicked in, but for that moment I ‘knew’ it was a peregrine (Ivory-billed Woodpecker, anyone?). Back then it would have been a truly staggering sighting; but in the last 15 years London peregrines have gone from 0 to 18 breeding pairs. Which is great news, but downgrades my peregrine sighting from ‘staggering’ to ‘exciting’.

And finally, I saw a firecrest, which was a very gratifying reward for all the times (hundreds? thousands?) I have seen goldcrests and dutifully checked for an eyestripe, just in case.

Two of the three British ticks were from the same jaunt to the Lee Valley Park in June where I had a good day, seeing I think eight species of warbler and hearing several nightingales. But I went there on an actual twitch to see the Savi’s warbler that had been hanging around for a bit. I definitely heard it (they have an extraordinary song) and I saw something which looked roughly like a Savi’s warbler and was in the right place… but was so distant it could have been a reed warbler that just happened to be in the same bit of reedbed. But it’s not a lifer or anything and I definitely heard it, so as far as I’m concerned that’s a tick.

And on the same day I saw a brown flash moving from one bush to another which, equally recklessly, I’m going to say was a Cetti’s warbler. Again, it was definitely there — it was singing beautifully — and it’s not  a lifer, so I’m happy to count it on my British list.

And the third British tick is, slightly embarrassingly, really, little-ringed plover. Which is an attractive wee beastie — the eye-ring makes all the difference — but which lacks the real star quality I’m looking for in my Bird of the Year.

I didn’t see anything new in Provence, but I did get a nice selection of the classic Mediterranean species: nightingales singing all over the place, black kite, the inescapable Sardinian warblers; a short-toed treecreeper nesting under the tiles of the villa where we stayed; Dartford warbler, subalpine warbler, woodchat shrike, woodlark, turtle dove. And one of the cutest birds EVAR, one which I haven’t seen for a few years, crested tit.

But my bird of the year was a species I’ve only seen once before, I think, in Norfolk many years ago, and that one was a female or a juvenile, so it looked, not wishing to be rude, a bit drab and nothingy. Whereas the male I saw in France looked like this:

That is one good-looking bird. I just love that little highwayman’s mask it has, and it’s such an elegant colour combination: pink, russet, slate blue and black. Just as birdsong is often beautiful but doesn’t really sound like music, birds are often beautiful, but despite what the creationists will tell you, they don’t necessarily look designed. Or at least not by a designer with real flair. They look like what they are, things which have developed organically.

But there are some species where that organic process has produced something which happens to coincide with human ideas of stylishness, and the red-backed shrike is one of those. It looks fabulous. And that is as good a reason as any to make it my Bird of the Year for 2009.

» Firecrest is © Sergey Yeliseev and used under the by-nc-nd licence. Lanius collurio – Pie-grièche écorcheur – red-backed shrike is © arpian and used under a by-nc-sa licence.

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Nature

A bit of Essexy birding

I had a good day at Rainham Marshes in Essex today. I got a new bird, Bean Goose; also saw peregrine, loads of ducks (wigeon, pintail, gadwall, shoveler, shelduck etc), stonechat, meadow pipit, huge numbers of lapwing, ruff, possible water rail, and the most obliging bird of the day, this extremely tame Slavonian Grebe:

Ah, the wonders of iPhone digiscoping.

And the most entertaining sighting of the day was an extremely manic and not-at-all-shy stoat which was scampering around the place like a mad thing.