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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
16th 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.
