Summer Holiday Birds (Part Three) - 'In Search of the Bearded Tit'

Bearded tit on the cover of the RSPB summer magazine.

Summer seems a long time ago now, but due to the sluggish nature of my blogtivity, there's still one more of summer's bird adventures to be recorded.

There's an RSPB reserve in Weymouth just outside the town, sandwiched between two A-roads, and we thought maybe it wouldn't be very idyllic or pleasant or bird-friendly, but we decided to give it a go on the last day of our holiday. When we got there it turned out it was pretty idyllic actually. It mainly consisted of wooden walkways through towering reed beds and though there were roads roaring around us and a Carpet Land just beyond, it still felt like a separate contained bird habitat.

In the visitor centre there was a list of recent sightings and a few things appealed; a visiting marsh harrier and the resident bearded tits in particular. 

Rose and I first went to Dorset a few years ago for a Christmas break and to celebrate being together one year, and that was when our interest in birds was awakened. I noticed blue tits for the first time in the snow and in the Dorchester museum there had been an exhibit about local wildlife, the bearded tit one of the most distinctive.

OK, I said, as we entered the reserve, I'm not leaving until I've seen a bearded tit. I decided that if they are here all year round and they had been seen as recently as yesterday, then surely I'd be able to see one if I only had enough patience. 

It's not really a tit, the bearded tit. It looks like a rare bird, an exotic bird, fat and rounded, the beard in question more like Fu Manchu moustaches.

On our trip round, we met a few other birdwatchers. Now we are more experienced, we tend to talk to the other birdwatchers more. We can speak more of their language and are less embarrassed by any lack of knowledge. No one had seen any bearded tits that day. The common consensus was that Weymouth's other reserve was better. One man played us the call of a bearded tit on a little speaker which he sometimes used to attract birds. This kind of technology is frowned upon by the staff here, so he was surreptitious. The call was indistinctive, just a high-pitched single note 'ping'. I told him I wasn't leaving until I saw one. He said that was a bold statement. 

We made our way round the circuit through the reeds, blocked at one point by an aggressive male swan who had built his nest in the middle of the path. We thought it best to go back round the other way rather than find out how strong swans can really be, whether they really can break your arm. 

And we didn't see any bearded tits. It's possible we heard them but though I stood and stared patiently, imploring into the reeds where they had been spotted, all I saw was a heron poking his head up and it became apparent that my vow not to leave until I had seen one would be exposed as foolhardy. Neither did we see the marsh harrier (it came and went just before we got to the hide apparently) or the hooded merganser, but we saw a tern, maybe a reed warbler, sandpipers, and had a pleasant if sweaty summer dawdle through the reeds.

Later as if to soothe the sting of our defeats we were flocked by friendly little birds in a park. We had some flapjack and fed it to sparrows who came right up to us; one even took a piece from my very fingers. A blackbird and a female chaffinch also joined in, though the greenfinches stayed in the trees, disapproving.

Epilogue

Going back through my recordings from that day I think I have identified the call of a bearded tit. We were so close. Hidden in those reed beds just in front of us, just out of sight, was the bird we were seeking. If the vicissitudes of nature had favoured us just a fraction more, the bird we were seeking might have chosen that moment to stretch its wings and show itself.

Bird of Prey, Flying Low

What bird is that? (photo taken by Stephen Burch)

On the morning of BirdFair we went looking first for some birds around the waters. The hides were sparsely populated being far from the excitement of the ospreys. It was grey and threatened by rain. The wooden huts provided shelter.

There were ducks and a few unextraordinary waders then Rose spotted a bird hovering about over to the right. It was a bird of prey. It could have been a kestrel but seemed subtly different. Kestrels have a black stripe quite visible bordering their tail. This bird did not. This bird was speckled, yes, and about the same size but with the lack of this black 'terminal band'.

A kestrel hovers silent and motionless with that tail fanned and head inclined intently toward the earth. Usually, unless you're lucky enough to see one pounce, they will just float on by and find a post to sit on. The bird we were observing did not drift to a resting place; this bird hovered, yes, but frequently swooped down low towards the grass. However, there never seemed to be any small rodents in his talons. He didn't fly off to devour his prey in privacy after any of these swoops. But surely he had caught something? He wouldn't be wasting all this energy. Maybe it was an inexperienced youngster? Either that or he was catching something. Bugs?

We watched the bird hunting for a long time. It was a privileged viewing position, just us there in the hide, just us and the bird not twenty yards away.

I thought it was a hobby. Later we looked in a bird guide and it said that hobbies feed on dragonflies on calm summer days, so that pretty much confirmed it and explained the confusing behaviour. Hobbies are like a cross between a kestrel and a peregrine because they've got moustaches like the peregrine but they're a similar shape and size to the kestrel. They assert their individuality by wearing 'brown trousers'. However, the easiest differentiating factor in this situation was its hunting behaviour and it's this kind of hint that can really expedite the frustrating quest of bird identification, especially if you don't have any binoculars. 

Kestrel (taken by Paul Cecil at Sussex University). Notice the differences. The first picture was a hobby.

Bird of Prey, Flying High

Two of the Rutland osprey family (photo taken through binoculars)

Back in the haze of early August, Rose's parents took us to BirdFair at Rutland Waters. We only had a ticket for the Saturday so on the Friday we went to look at the ospreys nesting there. Rutland is one of only two sites in England where ospreys nest, so it's a truly rare treat.

We went into the hide we'd been directed to and it was packed full of eager birdwatchers. Usually these places are empty or maybe there's someone in the corner patiently waiting with a telephoto zoom lens for a sighting of something interesting, but this hide was full of osprey fans.

The ospreys' nest was out across the waters on a raised plinth and there were a few more platforms where the family of five could sit and hang out and eat their prey. We watched them for a while as they flew around and hunted and whenever they did something interesting, like swoop down into the water for a fish, there was a burst of shutter clicking from the photographers in the hide like paparazzi. 

At one point there was a red kite in the sky, really high up. We only knew because someone else pointed it out. It was so high you couldn't see it with the naked eye. Only through binoculars.

Then this other bird came along. It was big, probably as big as the ospreys, maybe slightly bigger. From a distance its colours were dark with a light head. The ospreys didn't like it being in their territory and a few of them flew out to chase it off. It was like a kind of passive aggressive show of strength in numbers, no direct violence, just suggestions to the intruder that maybe it should go.

We didn't know what this trespassing bird was. The man next to me didn't know what it was either. I asked one of the more experienced and well-equipped bird watchers, and he said it was a female marsh harrier.

An example of a female marsh harrier (taken by someone else)

A week or so later, I was at work in the bakery, weighing up the farmhouse, and François was playing Fatboy Slim songs on his iPod. That song came on, the one with the sample that goes, 'bird of prey, bird of prey, flying high…in the summer sky' and it reminded me of seeing all those majestic birds at Rutland and it gave me a real thrill of happiness.

Summer Holiday Birds (Part Two) - 'A Crow in Danger'

The 'setting' for our story

On our first proper day of holiday we walked for a while in the relentless heat of the Dorset coastline until we found a bus to take us back to Weymouth beach. Then we returned in the early evening to the campsite and dined on pot noodles. After dinner we went for a walk, this time going left along the coast, the idea being to turn back in time for the sunset which we would watch and appreciate and get back just as the darkness descends.

On our way back, Rose spotted some movement in a hedge. It was a bird flapping its wings, a crow, and it seemed to be struggling. She wanted us to go and help it, or at least just go and check that it was alright, so we began to vault the fence into the field. Before we were even over the fence there was someone in the distance shouting at us, telling us we couldn't go through the field, that it was private property. We tried to shout back that there was a possibly a crow in trouble, but he said, 'let nature take its course.'

We got off the fence and continued walking back. Rose insulted the landowner rather fiercely, but out of his earshot. We thought maybe we'd be able to sneak in once he had gone but he stayed and watched us walk away. It seemed pretty heartless. 'Let nature take its course' is all very well but if a bird is suffering and you can stop it, then you should, surely?

We discussed it. We fumed at the selfishness, the heartlessness of man, the property greed, the disregard for animals. And we returned to the campsite. The field with the distressed crow in it happened to be pretty much adjacent to the field we were camping in, and its owner was sitting there surveying his land, making sure it was protected from intruders.

I decided we should just go over there and talk to him. Even though it seemed on the surface that this guy was a stubborn uptight landowner, shouted conversations across a field can only yield so much rushed personal information, like a car honking its horn always sounds rude even when it might just be softly informing someone that the traffic lights have gone green.

So we went over and this guy had his mate with him. They were sitting around a fire in their camp. They immediately recognised us and I asked them if they could just go and investigate the distressed crow, just, you know, if it's suffering, we should help it. Close up they were friendly, hippyish, young, long-haired. One of them half-reluctantly went to check out the distressed bird in the tree and we chatted to the other one, who told us about their comfortable lifestyle here in the field adjacent to the campsite. They grew their own food and sometimes shot pigeons to eat and once a seagull (its meat like shoe leather apparently) but not yet crow. 

Turns out the crow wasn't in distress, it wasn't trapped and it had gone by the time the actually rather friendly landowner reached the tree. He said it was probably just raiding a magpie nest, which in hindsight makes sense, the flapping aggressive rather than panicked, the victim the attacker.

I don't have a photo of the crow, but here are some fetching six-spot Burnet moths we saw on our morning walk:

Summer Holiday Birds (Part One)

We went camping in Dorset for our Summer holidays. The campsite, which overlooked the surprising Chesil Beach, was called 'Swallows Rest'. Migrating swallows obviously get across the sea and think 'this'll do, I can't be bothered to fly any further' and they spend their summer holiday at the campsite, like us, though to them it's like a winter holiday, a break from the heat of Africa to breed in the more hospitable British summer climate. 

They constantly swooped around us, from barn to stable to hedge, skimming close to the ground searching for food or maybe just showing off. (I always think birds are showing off - they probably don't even realise how cool they look. Or do they?) Sometimes two of them (lovers? brothers?) would acrobatically follow one another, just inches away at high speeds like Jedis, guessing which direction the other will go, like starlings, like red arrows.

On the way to the shower block there were some swallowlings sitting on a fence. I tried to have a close look at them but the parents dive-bombed me with guano. I was hit within seconds on the shoulder and had to wash my t-shirt. I felt bad for scaring them. I just wanted to look.

Here is a video of the swallows swooping around the campsite. You can kind of get the idea.

The birdlife was more active in Dorset than it was in the New Forest where we holidayed last summer, even though this part of the Jurassic Coast was quite a barren landscape: lots of exposed treeless fields, oppressive in the heat. We had many interesting bird encounters, far too many to pack into one post, so this is just 'part one'. 

A good holiday should take you out of your comfort zone and force you to examine your place in the universe. On our trip to Dorset, the birds were often the catalysts for this kind of self-discovery.

A Real Lark Ascending

The river on our previous visit

We went to Cuckmere on Sunday with Rose's parents. There a twisty river meets the sea at the feet of the seven sisters. Rose and I had been there a few years ago and it was drab and grey but this time the weather was kind to us. The spitting rain of the morning disappeared the moment we sat down to have a picnic beside the river and the countryside/riverside birds were gregarious in the sun.

There were little egrets like whitewashed herons predating the river and a kestrel hovering. We asked a birdwatching couple if they had seen anything and they said, 'not much: meadow pipit, whitethroat…' (neither of which we've ever seen). Then we saw two linnets drinking from a puddle, sparrow-sized but tinged strawberry-pink, some stonechats, swallows, cormorants and herons.

Best of all though were the skylarks. As soon as we got near the river to have our picnic, we could hear their insistent, complicated song that goes on and on without stopping. They nest on the ground in the long grasses near the water and they look like many British birds: brown and grey and black, speckled and striped. It's important to look as dull and mud-like as possible if you're going to nest on the ground, so close to predators. Like many plain-looking British birds the skylarks' secret weapon is their song, and they fly as they sing it. They rise upwards in obvious display mode broadcasting their songs in a wide boastful arc.

Vaughn Williams wrote a piece, a kind of violin concerto called 'The Lark Ascending' inspired by the British soldiers who heard the lark singing in the silences between gunfire over the trenches on the Western Front, and it would remind them of home. As we watched a single lark ascend into the blinding blue sky above us, singing its complex music, I tried to see it as the symbol of hope it was for those soldiers. I was glad to have the chance to see/hear for myself what VW was celebrating and I think you can hear some larkish similarities in the more extended twiddly violin passages.

That little bird in the middle is a skylark (you'll probably have to take my word for it). I took this picture the first time we went to Cuckmere,  though at the time we didn't know what it was.

Skylark singing. It's pretty intense.

'The Lark Ascending' by Ralph Vaughn Williams

The progress of this year's peregrine family

Last time this blog saw the peregrine family they were 2 adults and 4 eggs. Now they are 2 adults and 4 teenage hatched eggs. It was around 2nd May when they started hatching, now they're a month old and pretty much getting ready to leave the nest it seems.

I can't see them from my window anymore. We have moved. We have different windows. I can still see them from the street if I walk round the corner but it's not quite as fun. Here in our new flat there are quite a few starlings who hang around on the rooftops. I listen to their songs, which sometimes include a lovely glissando from high to low, the full gamut of their range. I must listen out for them imitating blackbirds and ringtones. Sometimes I hear goldfinches flying by but I haven't seen any and there have been some swifts in the sky this evening, they squeaked by almost at my eye-level. But alas we cannot see peregrines.

I haven't paid attention to much of the peregrines' chickhood, which I am starting to regret. We watched them for a while on the webcam the other day. They were feasting on a pigeon. Imagine seeing a peregrine catch a pigeon! In mid-air. (Did I say all this last year?) 

The nest box now is a death scene of pigeon feathers and bones. I can see the sun is rising in the webcam. Only one chick is in there at the moment. Have the others left him/her behind and ventured out into the world beyond the nest?

Here are some photos charting their development from egg to fluffy white thing to mini peregrine.

Scattering Starlings

The starlings on Brighton Pier are a spectacular sight. In the winter they huddle in the cosy warmth that the arcades above offer and in the evenings they go on these mysterious display flights in great morphing clouds. We usually try to get down to the pier at sunset on at least one occasion a season to see them. This year we went twice. Both times were clear sunsets and should have been perfect for seeing some murmurations. We fairly ran both times to catch the starlings before the light faded but they didn't seem to want to perform.

Instead of the tight well-trained mass formations we have seen previously (see here), they were undisciplined and flew off in separate little splintered groups, only mildly spectacular, like their telepathic guiding instincts were weak or maybe there had been disputes within the larger community.

Ed said he saw a million starlings one evening. He said they looked amazing and people were stopping in the streets to gaze in ecstatic rapture at them. 

Maybe we just went on the wrong days this year.

Rose looks on as the sun explodes and the starlings scatter

4 eggs now

Inspecting the brood at 3 egg stage

Apparently now there are 4 eggs. I haven't seen them myself but someone else saw them at the changeover (when the peregrines swap incubating duties) at 15:05 on Monday. The third egg was laid sometime on Saturday. There's quite a lot of guesswork involved as to the exact time of laying. It takes a team of dedicated webcam watchers to catch glimpses of the eggs which are usually covered by an incubating peregrine.

Check out peregrine cam here.

Egg Number Two

So it turns out the peregrine in the last post was in fact incubating 2 eggs, the second of which must have been laid some time between yesterday afternoon and now. Breaking news! See it live here.

Egg Number One

Peregrine falcon egg number one was laid on Monday. There it is, pink and lonely, like a Mini Egg. It's a bit worrying that it's been laid while the weather is still so cold. Perhaps it won't survive, but there will no doubt be others. Last year 4 eggs were laid, 3 hatched and 2 males survived to fledge. The peregrines lay multiple eggs in the hope that at least some of them will survive; they don't expect them all to survive. This is one of nature's cold truths.

Yesterday, on my day off, I sat at the desk by the window and watched through binoculars the falcon parents on the top of the building in the distance. I think we must have one of the best viewing positions in town here: on the first floor on a hill facing the nest. You could get closer, but you would also be lower. 

Watching the peregrines is still fascinating. Yesterday I could see the mother (bigger than the father) eating something with great enthusiasm. I couldn't see what it was. Maybe a pigeon. Or a rabbit? The father stood on the other side of the balcony motionless, endlessly patient.

Here's a picture of one of the parents incubating the egg about five minutes ago:

See the webcam here.

Quest for the Bittern

Castle Waters, Rye Harbour

Ever since I heard the boom of a bittern on a CD of British Bird Songs, I have wanted to find one. The boom, their foghorn-like mating call, sounds like no other bird, really bassy and resonant. Bitterns are more common here in the Winter, so recently I decided, with the Winter coming to an end (hopefully) that I was running out of time to find one.

I decided Rye Harbour would be an apt place to start the quest. It's fairly close, just 1hr22m on the train and with its wet reed beds, it should be a perfect habitat for bitterns. They are very particular about where they live and as a result are quite rare and shy. This was to be a solitary quest because Rose works in the week and time was of the essence.

Rye Harbour is surrounded by marsh land with reed beds and rivers running through, and there's a castle; if it wasn't for the industrial plant and motorways nearby, it would have felt like a Saxon wilderness.

I wasn't very hopeful that I would find a bittern, to be honest. I couldn't find any evidence of recent sightings online, but I would surely be placated by other interesting birds.

As it happened, the castle waters were teeming with birds: pairs of bickering oystercatchers; bare trees full of cormorants guarding their nests like reptilian vultures; duckloads of ducks: tufted, shovellers (with their goofy bills like shovels), teal, pochard, widgeon, and then there was a lone graceful great crested grebe and a little grebe the size of a duckling even though it's fully grown; a hovering kestrel; pied wagtails blown across the plains in unruly parties…then amidst all this bustling activity, as I approached a reed bed, there was a golden apparition. It flew swiftly and large across the waters to the opposite reed bank. It was a bittern. More golden than you would expect from the drawn pictures in bird books that make it look dull brown and yellow. In my mind's eye now it was pure gold glistening in the barely-there sun, then disappearing completely into the reeds.

I realised it was too unspring-like for him to be booming to potential mates yet. I tried to imitate the sound to challenge him into responding but I doubt he even heard my feeble efforts. I was partly just booming with excitement, I must admit.

Below is a video of a bittern booming. You can just about hear it. Mostly you can just hear excited birdwatchers saying, 'it's booming!' Great pictures though.

The Peregrines are back

So tenacious has the winter been that the return of the peregrine falcons to their nest on the block of flats I can see outside my bedroom window came as a complete surprise. But there they are, or at least one of them. You can see the live action here, this year's webcam thankfully free of adverts.

Last year the peregrines stayed until mid-November. I used to watch them as I sat at the desk by the window and I was surprised that they were still lingering on into the early Winter. The two surviving youngsters had left earlier, I think; it's quite difficult to know who's who.

The female laid her first egg last year on 22nd March, so hopefully it shouldn't be long before we see some this year, though the poor weather might well put them off.

This will be the last year I can sit by the window and watch them, because we're moving out. We almost went for somewhere where we could still see the nest from the bedroom window, but it was a gloomy place; I don't think we would have been happy there.

A dunnock's song compared to that of the robin and the wren

Dunnock in a tree with a sky much like today's

In the last few days there have been the first tentative intimations of Spring. The sun is proudly out and you can feel its heat a bit more tangibly. Yesterday on my way to work I heard a greenfinch (I thought I had written a post about the greenfinch's song, but I haven't. I meant to) and today I went for a walk to the library and on the way down, I saw and heard a dunnock in a tree in someone's front garden, in the street opposite the churchyard. 

I stood and listened to it sing for as long as I could. I had forgotten about the dunnock. They're quite friendly and don't mind being seen.

They look like sparrows but with less brown and black and white, and more grey, maybe slightly bigger too. In fact the dunnock is sometimes called a hedge sparrow, but though it may look similar to a sparrow, it has a much better voice. Where the house sparrows just chirp away monosyllabically and monotone, the dunnock has a lyrical twittery song. It's fast and high and complicated, offered in little snatches that are often responded to by another dunnock in another tree.

The dunnock's song sounds very stereotypically birdsong-like, but it's distinctive; its quick twittered phrases sound almost regular, like a Mozart allegro, whereas the robin, for instance, is jazzy, syncopated, surprising, and the wren's song, also very stereotypically birdsong-like, is all repeated trills and tremolo, a bit like the jabbing bits of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' in its rhythmic structures, only faster and more violent.

Below are some brief recordings of the songs of the dunnock, robin and wren, so you can hear the differences. I made them myself. You won't be able to see the birds very well, if at all. Spring is coming. The birds will all start to sing, and knowing who the songs belong to makes it sound more like they are singing to you.

Dunnock

Robin

Wren

The starlings, they are still here, just about

(This was written two years ago about a trip to see starlings on Valentine's Day. It's a bit more poetic than the normal posts. At the bottom there is some footage from that day with music by White Tiger, so you can actually see the birds I'm writing about for once.)

16^th February 2010

  

Before sunset, on the way home, we remembered our plan to go and see the starlings on the pier. It was a unseasonably sunny day, which would surely lure the birds out on a murmuration trip.

As we approached the pier we struggled to see any sign of the birds. We almost turned back but then Rose saw some high above the middle of the pier, a small cloud of them, only visible when they turned towards us a ripple of density.

So we continued towards them.

People stood in our way: friends unmoved by the spectacle behind them: small talk, small unthreatening obstacles, only small delay. The other Valentines couples are oblivious of foraying nature; they are on the pier for different honours.

At the moment the weather alternates between one day sunny, bordering on warm, and one day rainy, windy and cold; but when there are three nice days in a row, the starlings will fly away back to Norway. If it’s getting warmer here then back home it should be getting warmer too, but this place, this England can be confusing; there can be a day of glorious sunshine but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Summer yet or that the day after will be as nice. But when there are three nice days in a row, then surely they will be safe to go back.

Small puffs of collected animals linger and twist. If they were one entity connected by fibre and bones they wouldn’t achieve such smooth and perfect morphisms.

In flight their formations are profound and perfect but when they land, they land on each others’ heads, they bicker for space, push and scramble inelegantly and noisily on the arcade roof.

And then the sun goes down and they go to bed below the pier.

Merlin at Arthur's Seat?

(Bird not pictured)

At the beginning of December we went to Edinburgh for an anniversary getaway. Just outside the city is Duddingston Loch and Bird Sanctuary. It was close to our B&B so we walked there one icy day, hoping to see some interesting birds.

Unfortunately it wasn't much of a bird sanctuary. It was just a loch. There were geese and ducks, a teal, a little grebe, some swans, tufted duck, but nothing exciting - no puffins or anything.

So we continued walking up the big extinct volcanic that overlooks the city and leads to Arthur's Seat. It was muddy and icy and we took the hard way up. There were some treacherous moments and just as we had successfully navigated a particularly dangerous part, we saw a bird in the nearby air.

It hovered like a kestrel. I assumed it was a kestrel and watched it through binoculars, hoping it would spot some prey and swoop down for the kill. It didn't swoop but it lingered for quite a while and I got a good look at it.

Rose didn't think it was a kestrel. She thought maybe it was a hobby. It was a while ago now. I can't quite remember all its distinguishing marks, but I think I'm going to say it might have been a merlin, if it wasn't a kestrel. Hobbies don't really live in Scotland, whereas merlins do, they're residents throughout the year.

There are a lot of uncertainties. It was a while ago now, and even in the moment, it's hard to pinpoint the key features if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. How mottled was its breast? How big was it? (Merlins are the UK's smallest birds of prey.) How un-kestrel-like was it? It's hard to say, but I'm going to choose to believe it was a merlin, a merlin at Arthur's Seat, because that has a good ring to it.

Kestrel

Merlin