Osprey Hunt

In my last blog post I said we were going to try and find an osprey this weekend, so today that's what we set out to do. I bought some new second-hand binoculars and we scoured the internet for rumours of recent sightings. We decided to make our way to 'Passie's Pond', where one had been sighted a few days before. It's some way along the Adur, the river that meets the sea at Shoreham, near Brighton. 

The river was high when we started and there were quite a few other birds about: lots of swallows sweeping over, some little egrets on an island and we saw a kingfisher zoom past us like an arrow with a bright red behind, but no ospreys on the river. We were hoping Passie's Pond would be the place.

Passie's Pond was a dilapidated fisherman's encampment. All along this fenced off part of the river there were little jetties where solitary fishermen sat with their equipment and snacks. We weren't allowed to look round the actual pond though. A bitter little bald man made it clear we weren't welcome because we weren't paying to fish, so we ate our lunch out of his sight and gazed hopefully into the sky for a glimpse of a far superior, flying, fish hunter. What strange inefficient fishers we must look like to the osprey, with our complicated contraptions, waiting for the fish to come to us. The osprey glides hundreds of metres up in the sky looking for the best fish and picks it out with speed and accuracy and authority.

We were downhearted as we made our slow way home. The landscape along the river is bleak, punctuated with crumbling windowless buildings and industrial huts. Motorways roar around you and every now and then an intimidating gun shot punches out. The grey cloud cover above added to the desolation. I've never liked this place, I thought. We said consoling things to each other, like 'at least we tried' and 'it's nice to get out of the house', 'we saw a kingfisher, that was pretty good', and it was pretty good to see a kingfisher but the day had been a failure and we were resigned to it.

Then, as we walked back down the river, Rose saw something that looked fairly big hovering over a field. I thought it was probably just another crow or seagull, but it wasn't, it was an osprey, definitely an osprey and we became more convinced as we watched it through binoculars. It flew closer and swooped down to land in the field, and was immediately set upon by some crows. It had obviously trespassed into their land and was hounded out, just like we had been hounded out of the grumpy fishermen's special pond club. The osprey flew off into some trees across the river. While it was still in sight, I scrambled to take some photos. The photo above has an osprey in it. It's difficult to see, but it's in there. It's one of the black marks in the sky. If you use your imagination you can see the majestic fisherbird being hounded by crows.

And so the day quickly flipped from a resigned failure to a well-planned success. We had seen an osprey. 

When I was young I used to copy pictures of birds of prey out of books and I decided my favourite bird was the osprey. I'm not entirely sure why, it just looked cool. Now I've seen one, in the wild. It's a very satisfying feeling.

Here's someone else's better photo of an osprey:

New birds at Beachy Head

We went to Beachy Head on this sunny September Sunday, ill-prepared for the heat. We walked from Burling Gap up along the cliffs and heathland and from the start we could see lots of little birds swooping and fluting around. There were acrobatic swallows slicing up the air. There were hundreds of seagulls noisily harassing a fishing trawler out at sea. There were some yellow/grey wagtails hopping around and what I thought were wheatears. And there was one bird sitting on the toppermost branch of a bush. I watched it through binoculars for a while. It was brown with black and white stripy bits, a finchy beak and quite a long tail; one of those fairly nondescript browny small birds. I thought it was a bunting maybe.

Further on we saw a middle aged couple in matching walking gear looking out over the heather and gorse through binoculars. We went over and asked them what they  could see. They were looking at stonechats and directed us to the spot. It was a smallish bird with a red-orange breast, white collar and black head. My binoculars are broken and you have to almost cross your eyes to focus and wiggle the two sides and sometimes it can't be done in time, so I don't think I can say I saw the stonechat as efficiently as the others but I definitely saw something red-orangey.

(Photo taken at Beachy Head, by someone else in this blog)

The birdwatching man of the couple seemed knowledgable. He told us the wagtails we saw were yellow wagtails, because grey wagtails don't generally like this type of landscape. He told us that there were wheatears about too. And he told us that the stonechat is the symbol of the Sussex Ornithological Society (SOS). I just looked up the SOS and we're thinking of joining. To go on bird outings with middle aged people would be a new geeky level of devotion to the birdwatching cause, but I think the amount of knowledge we could absorb from such experienced enthusiasts would make it worth it. 

I later looked up the browny bird I saw. I'm almost sure it was a corn bunting. They are quite rare though, it seems - on the RSPB website their status is RED. Maybe I should tell the SOS. Maybe it's a important discovery.

Corn Bunting: Even the RSPB website describes it as non-descript.

There have been sightings of ospreys over Sussex, as recent as Saturday. We might go and look for some at the weekend. There is no bird I'd like to see more than an osprey.

Unexpected birdlife at King's College, Cambridge

We haven't been on any bird searches recently, not since we went to the New Forest, but at the weekend we were given a nice little surprise sighting. Sometimes you wait around for hours and find nothing, and sometimes the birds find you.

We went to Cambridge University with Rose's parents. As we were waiting in the tall stone entrance to King's College (pictured), for Rose's dad to get the keys to go punting, we heard some twittering from above.

In between the ornate vaults of the ceiling, round grey nests were attached. They looked a bit like they were made out of cement.  As we were watching them, a few little black and white birds peeped out and dived over our heads across the lawn towards the chapel.

They were housemartins. We had seen something swooping about earlier on and we weren't sure if it was a swift or a swallow. Turns out it was neither, but in many ways the housemartin is like a cross between the two: stocky like the swift but with the colouring of a swallow and a tail almost as pointy. I had never seen a live housemartin before. I don't know about Rose. It was a real treat. 

Thanks to Martin Cook at Cambridge for taking these photos for me (and thanks to Rose's parents for taking us there on a day out).

Listening for nightjars in the New Forest

We went on holiday last week to the New Forest, which has been described as a 'disappointing' place to see birds, but to city-dwelling novices, we thought, surely ancient woodland is always going to harbour some kind of birding wonder. 

So at the campsite I borrowed some binoculars from the reception hut, because mine are broken and the man behind the desk sensed I was on the lookout for birds. He told me the exact location where I could hear a nightjar calling in the early evening.

Nightjars are ugly beasts. It's as if physical beauty is not a consideration in the genetic make-up of a nightjar. Camouflage is the only thing that matters; the more they look like rotting lichened bark, the better. The sound they make is the more compelling reason to search them out. I think they win the prize, so far as my knowledge extends anyway, for the bird that sounds most like an analogue synth. Its call is a constant whirr, fluctuating in pitch, with a very fast LFO, almost creating a frequency modulation effect. Check it out here, at about 2 minutes in:

We went out to the appointed place, a T-junction some way into the forest behind the campsite. We got there at about half six, before the sun had properly begun to set and there was nothing there except a squealing squirrel and possibly a female pied flycatcher, and lots of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. It was evident we were being bitten and this made it very difficult to stay in one place for long, which is necessary if you want to properly birdwatch with patience.

We went back a few hours later, and then again the next day when it was properly dark, but we still couldn't hear the elusive nightjar. Perhaps it was a little too late in the season. The following morning, I couldn't find the man in the reception who had promised us our nightjar. Perhaps we had gone to the wrong place.

Our final excursion in the dark did however yield a few pangs of wildlife excitement: a little frog hopping around on the floor and some glow worms in the woodland mulch at the side of the path. 

All conquests are rewarding in one way or another.

The birds of St. Ann's Well gardens

For James' birthday we spent the afternoon in St. Ann's Well Park, playing ping pong and lazing in the sun. There's a big board of all the birds you can see there, including sparrowhawks. We wondered if they were being a bit optimistic about that one. Just under this bird information board, there was a little thrush hopping about in the brush. This was the closest I've ever been to a thrush. They're smaller than I thought they were.

Later, as we lay on the grass, there were a number of swifts looping in the sky. They look like small black aeroplanes, gliding around casually, eating all the insects and airborne spiders. They sometimes sleep in the air.

Ed said the wood pigeons sounded like they were people doing impressions of wood pigeons.

Dino said that on the train he saw a seagull interrupt two kissing lovers to pillage their picnic.

Big Tom told us about the bird of prey centre he went to in Lindisfarne. They had Eagle Owls and he had a harrier hawk land on his arm. It made me jealous. We haven't been on any bird expeditions for a while. But we're going on holiday this week, so hopefully we'll have some interesting stories to bring back.

The view from my window

As I sit at the desk by my bedroom window, I can see a fair amount of wildlife, especially considering it's a suburban street just off the main road. We think there are house sparrows nesting in the bushes opposite. I can often here a lot of tweeting. It sounds like sparrows but I've never seen any, maybe it's the sound of baby blackbirds.

There are some very yappy dogs, a jangly cat and the other night I saw a cute little fox cub looking lost and scared. I've heard the vixens screaming in early Spring. They sound like seagulls. 


The blue African lilies that grew last year in the garden opposite are coming back. Only now do I notice their long tentacle stalks rising out of the bush. Their flowering is something to look forward to.

And then in the distance towards the sea, I can see the block of flats where the peregrines live. They are small black specks against the white of the building, but through the binoculars, I can make out the details of their high-contrast monochrome feathers.

The three young peregrines fledged probably about a month ago and the webcam shows an empty nestbox with bits of dead pigeons scattered around on the floor. Now the only views of the youngsters are through the binoculars and it's quite hard to tell them apart from the adults, they are pretty much the same size.

I've only managed to catch them flying around a few times this year. I hope to see them play-fighting in the air, flinging food to each other for practice.

The small green seagulls of London?

While we were in London, on the lookout for birds in Kew Gardens and Richmond Park, there was a surprising little bird who kept turning up. If you live in London you will no doubt be familiar with the green parakeets who have freakily bred and prospered in the unlikely city setting, but to a visitor it is still a treat.

We left the balcony door open in our hotel room because of the heat and when we woke up, it was like waking up in the middle of a rainforest. All we could see through the door were trees and we could hear the squawk of the parakeets, who would occasionally  fly into sight.

Though they are pretty and exotic-looking, I can imagine their loud insistent squawking might get annoying for some people, if there were some living nearby, and I can imagine their noise might have an effect similar in annoyance to the seagulls of Brighton and Dover. The parakeets have a seagull-like aggression. They aren't shy. They think they own the place. Makes you think about how passive and quiet pigeons are, even though there are so many of them…

But who knows, maybe my outsider's interpretation of the parakeet's city status is inaccurate? However I took the above photo myself, at the WWT centre in Barnes, so I get some integrity points.

Mandarins in the Isabella Plantation

We were in London for a few days. We went to Kew Gardens and stayed in a hotel near Richmond Park. Richmond Park is a piece of preserved countryside on the Thames just to the left of London and it's a fantastic nature-packed place. There are lots of birds tweeting, and squirrels and most strikingly, there are many deer lazing in the shade under the trees, free to wander around the grounds. They made me feel slightly uncomfortable because they were so big and if they decided they wanted to kill me, they probably could quite easily, if they worked as a team. Nevertheless they were very beautiful.

We trekked across the central wasteland of the park, through the middle of the groups of deer. One walked purposely towards us. Luckily it passed us by uninterested. It was weedy and dusty and there were swamps and few trees. The sun was hot. It felt a bit desolate and unprotected, but we continued because we wanted to get to the garden on the other side.

This garden was the Isabella Plantation. It had been recommended to us by Robin, the friendliest concierge ever. He said there were rhododendrons and azaleas there so brightly colourful that they hurt your eyes. When we got there, the garden was a stark contrast to the barren dusty fields we had walked through on the way. Everywhere was bounded by a deep healthy green. Trees and bushes extended their fingers over the pathways and a narrow stream ran hidden through the centre. It was like a secret Alice in Wonderland oasis; it had the balmy summer atmosphere of the BBC version from the sixties.

There were a few ponds hidden around the place, but we could only find one. It was full of ducks, some with their ducklings trailing behind, looking very cute and fluffy and vulnerable. There were mallards, coots, moorhens, a shelduck, a few pochards and the best duck ever(?): the mandarin. The mandarin duck is probably, like the rhododendrons and azaleas, so richly colourful it hurts your eyes. The male has all the colours of the rainbow in his feathers. There was one hanging out in the pond with his wife, who was the dowdy brown version of her husband. They were waiting patiently in line for the bread being offered to them by old ladies. 

We saw the mandarin couple later on lazing on the grass in the shade of a tree. Unlike the other ducks, they were silent and it seemed like they were cut off from the other ducks, as if the mandarin male was disapproved of by the other, plainer ducks, for being too ostentatious.

The nightingale (is hard to spot)

Spring is the most vital, exciting time for nature. 'Spring is sex; Summer the lazy post-coital wallowing. Autumn is the sepia-tinged death of the relationship; Winter the lonely wander through the wilderness.' 

In spring the birds sing. They properly sing, to show off their vocal cords, because a male with a strong resounding voice will make a good mate, he will have good genes to pass on.

One of the most striking spring birdsongs is that of the nightingale. Unfortunately you won't hear one in the town. I once told an RSPB woman that I thought I saw one in the St. Nicholas rest gardens near my house and she flatly told me this was impossible. I think it's because nightingales make their nests in low bushes and this wouldn't be workable in the town with all the cats and foxes.

Almost exactly this time last year we went on a pilgrimage to Pulborough Brooks to find some nightingales. For only a short time in May they sing and their juicy alarm-like piercing song is easy to distinguish. We heard them alright but they are difficult to spot, and rather innocuous looking besides, just a dull browny-grey colour blackbird sized bird. Their evolutionary allowance was spent mostly on their song.

Here is the video I took of what we saw and heard of the nightingales at Pulborough Brooks: (you can also hear a robin, chiff chaff and great tit in the background)

Peregrine update: Pigeon feast

Three of the four eggs have hatched now and the chicks are quickly growing into fluffy white trainee-killers. It's not looking good for the egg that hasn't hatched. It's often left exposed; I think the parents have given up on it. In fact, I think it's gone now. Maybe they ate it.

If you're lucky, you can see a gory mealtime, you can watch as the mother methodically rips chunks of dead pigeon and feeds them to the gaping chick mouths. She crunches down the less easily digestible parts for herself, like the legs.

There is a slightly smaller chick who must be the youngest, and he struggles to get a share of the pigeon. He strains and pushes but he can't reach the proffered flesh. His siblings have longer necks and the strength to shoulder him away. We were worried that the small chick might slowly starve in this fashion, but a pigeon's raw meat goes a long way and soon the bigger chicks are getting full and the small one can assert his hungry desperation. 

And then there are long periods of inactivity. The mother still incubates the hatched chicks to keep them warm and from time to time she writhes about as if the chicks are making her uncomfortable. The whole family are rarely seen together. Even at night. When the chicks grow up the parents can spend more time together, content in the knowledge that this year's breeding has been completed successfully.


See the webcam here. 

A jay on the way to Stewart Lee

Me and Rose were on our way to see Stewart Lee and we were walking along the street where we had previously spotted a song thrush (read about here). It was a damp dusk and in the distance, Rose spotted a medium-sized bird on the rooftop of one of the houses. I thought it was a pigeon. Rose thought it was a jay. It was a jay. Bouncing about along the rooftop and splashing in the water in the gutter, he was friendly or oblivious and didn't mind people watching him. He was probably showing off his springtime virility.

The jay is a corvid, a member of the crow family, but unlike the deathly dark mantle of their cousins, their feathers are rusty brown and black and white, rather like a giant chaffinch, but with a striking electric blue wing feather and black moustache. They are the dandies of the crow family and their raspy calling is like a leering smoker's beckoning.

We watched the jay for a little while. It's an attractive bird and not often seen round here. As we were conspicuously craning our necks, a woman walked past. She saw the bird and our interest in it. She asked if it was a woodpecker. Then the jay flew off into a tree to meet his wife, presumably, who was pottering about on a branch. I think they had just moved to the area for spring and were collecting material for their new home.

Peregrine falcons outside my window

As I sit in my room, I can see a white block of flats dominating the skyline against the sea and at the top of this block of flats live a family of peregrine falcons. Last summer I watched them for hours as the parents surveyed the city below and sometimes the three youngsters would playfight in the sky, diving at hundreds of miles an hour. The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal in the world when it dives through the sky. They went away for the Winter but now they're back.

There’s a webcam that shows the interior of the peregrines’ nestbox. At the moment all you can see is the back part of the mother peregrine as she incubates her eggs. The only movement is the swell of her breathing and the wind rustling her feathers. I haven’t seen the male yet this year, but he must be around somewhere gathering food.

On youtube you can see the mother laying her first bright pink egg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GNXz1vmNew&feature=youtu.be. And here is the live webcam: http://www.justin.tv/brightonperegrines? - /w/2934149296/4. Last year we only discovered the peregrines outside the window after the eggs had all hatched and the youngsters had grown up. This year we can watch the whole glorious, surprisingly quick process from egg to young adult.

Isle of Wight wheatears

I was in the Isle of Wight for a few days staying at Rose’s parents’ flat. I went on my own and she joined me later. On one of the days I went for a walk along the clifftops to the Ventnor Botanic Gardens, along a path that dipped and rose between coves and vegetation.

Jackdaws proliferated and I could hear greenfinches and great tits, then at one portion of beach, Castle Cove, which a castle shaped house used to overlook before it was demolished for residential development, there were a number of mystery birds flying about. I looked at them through broken binoculars and struggled to focus. They seemed like wagtails, but their colouring wasn’t quite right. The feathers were greyish brown and the breast was orangey. They sported stylish black eye stripes.

The little birds bounced about discretely, they sung no songs, looking around on the grass and on the sandy beach, perhaps for insects. A teenager was riding a motorbike up and down a grassy bank in his garden. He rode it cautiously down and then as fast as he could the way back up. I followed the birds to the low sandstone cliffs where they seemed to be living.

When I got home I looked them up in a bird book and found them to be wheatears, I think. Their Latin name is Oenanthe oenanthe.

Southampton

I went to see my brother Ben, who lives in Southampton with his girlfriend, Steph. Their flat overlooks the river. As soon as we got there I looked out of the window at the river through their hefty binoculars and saw an oystercatcher. It was standing on a half-submerged wooden structure, which had recently been looted of its metal by opportunistic gypsies. At first I didn’t know what bird it was that I was seeing. It was black and white and anonymous until it revealed the distinctive pointy orange oyster-catching beak that it had been hiding in its feathers.

Near the lone oystercatcher were a group of about twenty other birds all huddled together and still. They were grey. I decided they must be sandpipers; they seemed about the right size. After a while they all flew away. They had been sitting there doing nothing for a few hours and then they just flew away as if they had decided in an instant with one mind.

Steph got some old bread. I think she soaked it in water or milk. We threw it over the balcony for the seagulls. They all swooped about catching the bread chunks in mid air. These seagulls were black-headed gulls with the dark mark beside the eye, which will later spread in the summer and complete the eponymous black head.

They are smaller and friendlier than the aggressive skinhead herring gulls of Brighton and Dover, and they have less grating screeches.

Steph tried to get one to take bread out of her hand but none of them were quite that bold, even when she looked away to make them feel safer. They weren’t hungry enough for such potential danger.

 

(taken by Joe Punton)

A bird close to home

On the way home from town, on the road whose pavement is raised on steps and overlooks the sea, whose houses occupy just one side so as not to spoil the view, we heard a bird’s piercing song. We could see it in a tree but it was too far away to identify for sure. It sounded like a song thrush, but maybe slightly more songlike. A mistle thrush? The only way to know for sure was to rush home and get some binoculars. Home was close, so we did.

The bird had moved tree but we found it by its song in a new tree. It soon stopped singing but we stood and looked at it for a while. It was difficult to see in the fading sunlight. Probably a song thrush. (see previous blog)

As we looked, a friendly vagrant called out to us. He told us that he had seen the meteorite on Saturday 3^rd March. He didn’t think much of it until he saw it on the news the next day. You could probably look it up on the computer but when he left school in 1981 they didn’t have computers. He began to move on.

Then another passer-by shouted to us, asked us what we were looking at. We explained. It must have seemed like there was something extremely interesting in that tree for there to be two people staring into it with binoculars. The man told us that he had seen a program on TV where there were lots of people in a field looking at a rare bird and then a big tomcat came and ate it up.

The vagrant at the other end of the street was shouting something about how he was observing an observer observing the observers.

The late birds ‘get the worm’

We’ve been to the RSPB reserve at Pulborough Brooks once before. This time we had a room booked in a tavern in nearby Bramber so we could take our time and stay until the dusk closing time.

We saw goldcrest, nuthatch, blue tit, great tit, robins, chaffinch, a green woodpecker pecking at the floor right in front of one of the hides, teal, wigeon, shelduck, geese, handsome redwing, fallow deer and noble fallow stag, shoveller, goofy snipe, curlew, lapwings, long-tailed tits at the bus stop, ruffless ruffs, no birds of prey unfortunately, no bullfinch, no crossbill, but out of all the birds we saw, two birds stood out and both of them emerged right at the end of the day.

The sun was setting and it was becoming difficult to tell the birds from the stray leaves and cones in the trees. I heard a loud clear song different from all the robins and the incessant great tits whose songs filled the air. It was like a blackbird in its squawk-like tone but the repeated phrases were shorter: little riffs and arpeggios, liet-motifs, they were more enigmatic, less melodic than the blackbird. I found the bird in the binoculars. It was a song thrush clearly on display on an outstanding branch, showing himself for an evening performance. His colours are humble browns, plump with a creamy speckled belly. I’ve never seen one before or heard one in real life. Such a proud song, I stood and listened for a while, he was still going when we left.

We went back into the visitor’s centre which was just closing and the assistants were relieved to get their binoculars back. A few other lingering visitors were looking through the binoculars and scopes out of the big viewing window. A little chicken sized bird waddled out from the reeds and the expert said we were lucky to be seeing it. It was a water rail, almost a chicken, almost a wader, tentatively pecking on the ground, just long enough for us to get a view through one of the scopes before we were ushered out of the visitors centre so they could close up and go home. The water rail makes a noise like a pig snuffling apparently, but we didn’t get to hear it. It's blue-grey belly and orangey-red bill make a satisfying exotic combination, but it comes across as a slightly unfortunate bird what with the pig-noise it has been lumbered with, the awkward chicken legs and the inelegant name. It seems content for sure, but that arouses the sympathy all the more.

Great Crested Grebe at Shoreham

It was a day I remember almost entirely from beginning to end, every detail in between. We (me and Rose) went to Shoreham, just down the coast from Brighton. We had been told of a nature reserve on the beach with wild flowers and accompanying animals and so went to explore.

Off the crawling meandering bus we wandered against aggressive wind towards the river, which we followed for a while, hoping to see river birds, or any birds, but there was little except mild bending water. Though the sun shone generously in intervals, the wind was unpleasant and made it cold. We walked partway down the river path which would have led to Guildford if we kept going long enough, but we turned back on ourselves across a bridge to what we hoped was a more populous nature world. However the sunny side of the river offered only seagulls and bushes.

I was lacklustre. The wind was annoying me. We went to see the houseboats, a colourful row of converted battleships and barges aground on the riverbank. And then in the river between the boats in the boat street, a bird sailed past. We followed it. It wasn’t a duck or a swan, but something in between. I took photos on my camera and zoomed in to try and see it closer. (I had forgotten the binoculars.) It was a great crested grebe. We followed it excitedly up the river, trying to get closer to it to take a good photo. It just floated along, lazy, majestic, like a purple Mandarin prince visiting from the East.

At home I had a bird magazine with a GCG on the front. I never expected it to make the jump from magazine cover to real life. When we spotted the GCG, the day changed from wind-beaten birdless amble to victory march. The trip had been worth it if only for this and everything else afterwards was coloured by the sight of this colourful bird, long after he had ducked under the water under the bridge away from us  - the subsequent desolate beach stretch of nature reserve peppered with sea cabbage and viper bugloss, the peninsula fortress, the long harbour dead end retracing of steps, the almost missed bus, the fish and chips, all coloured by the sighting of this obliging unexpected bird.

My unimpressive photo

Among a wealth of birds...2

At the Arundel duckworld some of the ducks were caged in large landscaped pens. These were presumably the rarer species less accustomed to survival with rivals, put there to remove all possible risks and ease them back into numbers. In one of these contained environments, a small yellow bird flittered into view. It was either a yellow wagtail or a grey wagtail. Both have distinctive breast yellownesses. With hindsight I’d say it was the yellow wagtail.

It was confined in the cage as far as we could see; as far as we could see, there were no escape holes in the mesh. The yellow wagtail flew around the cage in and out of view and outshone the rare ducks like a secret bonus bird.

We wondered if it was happy in that cage without family and potential mates. The bird attendees must know it’s in there and have deemed it appropriate to leave it in there, and we trust them to know what’s best for the birds, but still it seems a bit lonely.