Category: Nature

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 14: Wilson’s Storm-petrel

The tubenoses — the petrels, shearwaters and albatrosses — are a wonderful group of birds saddled with a slightly unfortunate name. It’s true that they do have tubular nasal passages on top of their beaks, presumably to help them sniff out food at sea, but it’s not exactly a name full of the romance and mystery of the open ocean.

But then you or I might not look at horses, tapirs and rhinoceroses and feel the most interesting thing about them is that they have odd numbers of toes. That’s taxonomists for you: they concentrate on what’s most distinctive, not what’s most exciting.

And for me, what makes the tubenoses so wonderful is that connection with the sea. They are genuinely sea-birds; to watch a shearwater or an albatross skimming between the waves is to see a bird completely inhabiting a world that we can only visit. The open sea is where they are at ease; for them, dry land is where the danger lies. Most species only come to land to breed, and even that, only at night. I visited Skomer last year, the Welsh island with about 120,000 pairs of Manx Shearwaters — 30% of the world’s population — and if it wasn’t for the bodies of those who had fallen prey to the Great Black-backed Gulls, you would never have known they were there at all. To see them, I had to take a boat trip out as night fell, to watch the flocks building up offshore.

But shearwaters and albatrosses, with their stiff-winged, banking flight, have a sort of purposeful quality, a robustness that seems fitting for a life at sea. What’s amazing about the storm-petrels is how completely unsuited to that life they seem. This is a group of Wilson’s Storm-petrels:

They are little, delicate, fluttery birds, and when they are feeding, they flutter along close to the water and patter their little feet on the surface. Supposedly the name, petrel, is a diminutive of Peter because, like St. Peter, they walk on the water.

It’s not so surprising that they feed at sea, perhaps, but the idea that they make their whole lives at sea, that they spend the winter out among the big rolling grey waves of the open ocean, is astonishing.

It’s not just storm-petrels, of course. Puffins, those comical little birds which look like cuddly toys, or earnest, permanently surprised clowns: they overwinter out in the middle of the north Atlantic. Writing this at night in London, with a cold breeze coming from the window, it’s an extraordinary thought, all those little birds sitting out there on the water somewhere in the cold and the dark.

» Both photos of Wilson’s Storm-petrels (1, 2) are © Patrick Coin and used under the CC by-nc-sa licence. Incidentally, check out this hypnotic video I found while looking for photos.

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Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 13: Long-tailed Tit

Familiarity breeds contempt, and it’s hard to get excited about even the most attractive of birds when you see them for the 20,000th time. But there are a few birds which are dirt common but which never fail to give me a little thrill of pleasure every time I see them. Like long-tailed tits:

They are just so adorable, like little feathery lollipops.

They travel around in restless groups, constantly talking to each other with little sree sree noises; outside the breeding season it’s not unusual to see groups of 25, 30, 40 birds, and you can stand in a gap between a couple of trees and see them fly over, one after another, half powder-puff and half tail, and they just keep on coming and coming. If it wasn’t for all that tail, they’d be one of the smallest birds in Europe, and they are Just So Cute. Even their nests look like something a flower fairy would live in.

» Long Tailed Tits is © SteveB!; Mésange à longue queue (Aegithalos Caudatus) Long-Tailed tit is © Luciano Giussani. They are both used under the CC by-nc-sa licence.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 12: Chestnut-crowned Antpitta

This is one of my favourite birds ever, the Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, Grallaria ruficapilla:

Or in a more orthodox portrait:

They have a simple three-note call, and on a birding trip to Venezuela we encountered one individual that consistently got the notes in the wrong order. Which got funnier every time it did it.

» Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, perhaps my favorite blurry shot ever is © Andy Jones, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence. chestnut-crowned antpitta was originally uploaded to Flickr by jj birder and is © John Jackson.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 11: Red-necked Phalarope

When I read Halldor Laxness’s Independent People, it kind of made me want to visit Iceland. On the one hand, it’s a bleakly pessimistic tale of a man struggling to drag himself out of grinding poverty, only to be crushed underfoot by changing circumstances. On the other hand: phalaropes!

Phalaropes — that’s the Red-necked Phalarope — are related to sandpipers, snipes and suchlike. Apart from being rather beautiful, they have a couple of particular quirks of their own. One is this extraordinary feeding behaviour (Red-necked Phalarope again, this time in winter plumage):

That spinning swirls food up to the water surface where they can pick it up — or at least that’s the assumption; it’s not an easy thing to test, and I don’t know if anyone has tried. Whatever the purpose, it is incredibly endearing watching them spin around like little demented rubber duckies.

The other unusual thing about them is that the female is more brightly coloured, while the drabber male incubates the eggs and raises the young. The rule of thumb in biology, that males are larger, more brightly coloured, and more aggressive, arises in the end from a basic physiological bias: sperm are easy and cheap to produce, eggs are more expensive. Babies are more demanding still. So there’s a general advantage for males to try to mate with as many females as possible — they can always make more sperm, so any chance to reproduce is worth a shot — while females have a different set of incentives: because there is a practical upper limit on the number of offspring they can produce, they need to be more choosy their mates. Which is why, in human societies, ‘polygamy’ actually always means ‘polygyny’; men having many wives is common, wives with many husbands incredibly rare.

That logic does apply to birds as well as mammals: birds’ eggs are still somewhat expensive to produce — more so than sperm, anyway — and in the vast majority of birds the males are the ones with the glamorous plumage. But the imbalance is less dramatic, and if the males can be persuaded to sit on the eggs and do all the rearing, that frees up the females to maintain territories, mate with several males, leave eggs with each of them and bugger off leaving them to bring up the chicks.

This role reversal has happened in a handful of bird species, including the phalaropes, the painted snipes, the dotterel, the jacanas (lily-trotters), and the buttonquails. These birds are all somewhat related, but not especially closely; they are in the same large group that includes waders, gulls, terns and auks. Clearly it is a perfectly functional arrangement, but it still leaves you wondering: why them? What circumstance arose that caused this behaviour to switch? Did they go through a period of raising the young cooperatively before the sexual roles diverged again, this time the other way round? It’s fascinating stuff.

» IMG_8198 is © Bjarni Thorbjornsson and used under a CC by-nc licence. The video is from MIT TechTV.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 10: Sword-billed Hummingbird

When I started this advent calendar I intended to just post picture of a bird each day and leave it at that, but I keep thinking of things I want to add. Today, though, I really am just going to post a picture:

That is a Sword-billed Hummingbird, Ensifera ensifera. Not, sadly, one of the hummingbirds I saw in Ecuador.

» Sword-billed Hummingbird (Ensifera ensifera) is © David Cook and is used under a CC by-nc licence.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 9: Sedge Warbler

You wouldn’t last long as a birder if you weren’t able to find beauty in little brown birds, but they don’t always photograph well, so I was pleased to find this lovely shot of a sedge warbler on Flickr:

The Sedge Warbler, Acrocephalus schoenobaenus, is an archetypal LBJ — Little Brown Job — but is actually quite flashy compared to some of its relatives; with that striking white eyebrow stripe and streaky back, it can look positively glamorous on a sunny day in spring, perched on top of a bush and singing its heart out.

And it’s the song, really, which is the most remarkable thing about them. It’s a bargain that many birds strike with evolution: being small, drab and inconspicuous is great when it comes to avoiding predators, but when it’s time to attract a mate, you need to be a bit less… boring. So they sing. And the finest singers are usually found among the drabbest birds: the warblers, the larks; the nightingale.

These birds are like the anti-peacocks; the peacock has the most extraordinary plumage imaginable, but all it can do is squawk. The song of the nightingale or the skylark is an evolutionary freak as remarkable as the peacock’s tail.

The particular trick of the Acrocephalus warblers is mimicry. Sedge warblers produce a fast, rattling song, full of croaking noises, squeaks and whistles, and in amongst it all you can hear little snatches of other species: tits, finches, wagtails, coot. And apparently, as well as those European species, there are little snatches of African bird calls, learnt while the warblers are overwintering south of the Sahara. The result isn’t perhaps quite as pleasing to the human ear as nightingale song, but it’s still a remarkable thing — and the female sedge warblers seem to like it.

You can hear a selection of sedge warblers on xeno-canto, an excellent database of European birdsong I discovered while writing this post. And also its cousin, the marsh warbler, whose song consists almost entirely of mimicry.

» Sedge Warbler is © Tim Williams and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.