Our wedding...

Groom remains calm in the face of non-show by bride...

Groom's faith rewarded!

Best Man - Chris - makes ribald comment. Bridesmaid - Laura - is not amused...

Basti and Laura

Friends...

Groom camps it up for the cameras

The girls...

Family...

...friends...

Our respective grandparents

Family...

The inevitable confetti. Can't believe my grandmother threw her cone as well though...!

Who started that, then?

The bride at the end of the day

Laura's next, by the look of it!

'Nuff said.

It was a great day...!

Chris & Kay

Chris & Kay kindly stopped by for our wedding - Chris to be my best man, Kay to make sure he didn't run away. They stopped by on Good Friday so they could have a week with us, having never spent any time birding or even visiting Devon before. So we had a week of effective holiday, showing off some of the many delights of our fair county!

As the journey down was obviously rather quicker than anticipated, we started with a wander round Parke (National Trust), where between catching up with the gossip of a year's fermentation, we managed such delights as a pair of Mandarin duck and a goodly variety of Common Buzzard.

Whilst Na entertained some of her visiting family on Saturday, Chris, Kay and myself began some more serious birding with a short visit to Yarner Woods, where we failed to see the Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers that Na and I had found the weekend before, but did have some corking views of Marsh Tit, Nuthatch and Great Spotted Woodpecker. We returned to show our faces to the family, who had been shown around our new house, then packed off to Stover Lake to wind down - a swarm of Sand Martin and (Barn) Swallow were trawling midges from the water's surface, whilst Great Crested Grebes indulged in some semi-serious display. More Nuthatch and Marsh Tit added some distinctly 'foreign' flavour for our visitors from the Isle of Man.

Chris & Kay at Stover, admiring Great Crested Grebes displaying - a scarce wintering bird on the Isle of Man 

Sunday began with a full-on Easter-egg hunt, followed by a half-successful exploration of the Exe estuary. The area was heaving with people, which made it rather difficult to find many birds - the Slavonian (Horned) Grebe was lurking at Starcross as usual, now in full-on spanking breeding plumage, but very little else showed - no Woodlark, no Cirl Bunting, no waders worth mentioning... weather was nice though!

We decided that Monday was worth striking out a little further. We dragged Chris from his bed at the unsociable hour of 7.15, and headed down to Prawle Point. Just to increase the tension, I decided that Cirl Bunting (a new species for both Chris and Kay) could wait whilst we checked out Ash Lane and Gammon Head. We worked our way round the cliffs towards the coastguard's cottages, admiring Peregrine and Yellowhammer en route, as well as the strikingly pale Buzzard that's been at this site for a number of years. Eventually we reached the thicket below the carpark, where everyone traditionally gathers to see Cirls, and sure enough, as well as a couple of people toting improbable phallic substitutes lenses, a pair of Cirl Bunting popped up to show themselves - albeit rather distantly and in a fresh breeze. "Never mind", I assured the visitors, "we shall see them better a little further on." And so we did. A sparkling male Wheatear on the coastal rocks, then at least two pairs of Cirl at point-blank range, in perfect sunshine. We headed back through Slapton, where a Cetti's obliged briefly, followed up with a cracking Long-tailed Duck, which was moulting into breeding colours.

Tuesday was 'let's iron shirts' day. Wedding looming: better look smart (so I left my shirt here). Chris, Kay and myself headed up the lane behind my parents' house whilst Na headed off with my sisters for a practice beautifying session. We managed distant views of the target species - Woodlark - as well as some point-blank views of a Little Owl, which glared at us suspiciously over it's wall, and a small flock of Stock Dove.




Coot. Slapton. Nuff said.

We packed Chris and Kay off on Wednesday to make of the moors what they would. They came back happy, though without seeing anything of great note.

Thursday dawned clear and bright, so I took Chris & Kay off to look for Lesser Spotted Woodpecker again, and again we failed. We found all sorts of interesting goings-on, but no LSW. Undaunted, we drove off around Exeter to the pebblebeds, where we found two more new species for the Manxies: Dartford Warbler and Brimstone butterfly. A stop-off at Bowling Green Marsh on the way back provided some better waders: Avocet, Black- and Bar-tailed Godwit, and Knot, as well as some lingering Wigeon and Shoveler...

Peacock butterfly on willow, Aylesbeare. Bee-youtiful.

Friday was totally useless for birding: Na and I got married, so we didn't get out at all...!

We spent a while recovering on Saturday - Chris and Kay were packed off to Yarner again, where they dutifully saw LSW and a couple of male Pied Flycatchers, newly arrived from Africa. A total trip list of about 102 species, which isn't too bad for a week with a wedding in.

Na and I finally got some peace today - we headed out to Yarner ourselves, where we managed to find all three British breeding woodpecker species, a handful of Pied Flycatcher and a singing Tree Pipit - another summer migrant on another beautiful spring day. Not a bad week in all...

Great Spotted Woodpecker. Stover. Not the best photo, but I can live with that.

Housing - pt II

All change.  Inside first. We moved in to this... the first boxes of our gubbins on the floor.

The bedroom walls were painted pink, over several layers of wallpaper. Some of the wallpaper had been stripped back already.

Looking to the bedroom window.

Not much to be told there.

Spare room - currently inhabited by Chris & Kay - prior to being filled with everything we owned.

The livingroom. Mushroom and carmine walls. Yum.

Looking to the back garden from the livingroom.

The kitchen. A sort of raspberry-terracotta on the walls. Also yum.

Midway through the kitchen: now full of our belongings. Coolbox doing sterling service as 'fridge.

Arturo leans casually in the hallway.

Self and Arturo vacuuming the livingroom, prior to getting varnish down on the floor.

Our bedroom, in progress...

Liquid sunshine on the livingroom walls now.

Livingroom finished: books and some pictures making a more homely feel.

Our bedroom in a semi-livable state.

A final coat of paint on Chris & Kay's walls

And the garden... after a very minor bit of bramble clearance

And after a significant amount of work!

Chris doing his bit...

And Kay doing hers...

Housing... and signs of spring!

No exciting photos, no exciting birding, no exciting travelling. We've just bought a house and I've been flat out for what seems like months, ably assisted by Arturo early on and Na when she returned from her scholarship trip to Germany & The Netherlands. We've not moved far, but the house has taken up a lot of our time & effort... Pictures may follow.

Some brief walks out into paint-free air and a little bit of deep thought in the office have produced some spring migrant birds pushing north: Sand Martin and Swallow trickling up the Exe, though the first ones only in the past week; with singing Chiffchaff and Blackcap at home making the woods next door sound a little warmer. I was also dragged out to do my second Willow Tit survey of the season, which again resulted in no birds found - though a Marsh Tit responded vigorously to the tape prompt! Bird of the day was in fact this rather handsome Common Toad (Bufo bufo), which I narrowly missed with my girt great feet.

For the birdy reader, our garden list already stands at some 30-odd species - best so far being a drake Mandarin high-tailing it up the river. At some point I'll get round to working out which plant species we have here as well, but the garden's pretty shabby and needs some work to be able to get round it sensibly.

Black-headed update II

Another snippet of news on the ringed Black-headed Gulls. The ringing details for the adult with the Latvian ring have been forwarded on by the BTO and the Latvian ringing scheme: he/she/it was ringed in Riga (the capital), on 7th March 2008, aged at the time as a bird more than 2 years old. It's back again this winter, so managed to survive a couple of 2,000km trips across Europe without too much hassle. Hope to see it again next winter!

Updated map:

It's interesting to add in the handful of ring readings gleaned over a winter in Vienna, some years back - which includes one bird from Malmo, the same site (and ringer?) as one of my Exeter ring-readings...:

Finally, a bit of an abstract from last weekend - bubbles in ice from a frozen hollow in a Dartmoor tor.

Friends at the weekend

I caught up with some old friends on Saturday. They probably don't recognise me, but that's fine. I don't really know them all that well either (though I'm learning more about them every time I see them!), but we've each been hanging round the Exe every winter since at least the early 1990s. They are, of course, Brent Geese - our standard Dark-bellied Brent (Branta bernicla bernicla). The Exe is actually designated as a Special Protection Area for its wintering bird population, in part for supporting an internationally important proportion of the world's Brent Goose population!

A small proportion of them bear coloured rings on their legs: I first consciously noted this back in the late 1990s or early 2000s and didn't think much of it, and to my shame, didn't follow them properly. Since then, weather, location and girlfriends permitting, I've tried to put in a few mornings each winter to look for marked geese on the river. Each of them has a single ring on each leg, which is usually marked with a letter, a number or a stripe or two - whilst some geese can wear neck-collars, Brent can't, as their neck markings are important social indicators: coloured collars would be likely to affect the behaviour and status of the bird carrying it.

I quickly discovered some constancy in their appearances: I've seen 'O-R2' - a bird with an orange ring with a single black band on the left, and a red ring with a white 2 on the right - most years since 2002, likewise ORR4. Interestingly, some of them seem to stick to particular parts of the estuary too: ORR4 and OYRH seem to prefer the Dawlish Warren and Starcross golf course area, whilst O-R2 and GFGX always seem to be at the northern end of the estuary, round Bowling Green Marsh and Powderham.

 

Typical 'scope view of the Brent at Starcross golf course - a bit gloomy, but nice clean conditions. Lovely short grass. This is the easiest place of all to see colour-marked Brent on the Exe...

 

Zoomed in a little, the old favourite ORR4 can just about be read, despite my grotty photo.

Eventually, I found out something about the origins of these birds. This was a bit of a mixed bag; slight disappointment as many of them were actually ringed on the Exe - so no mega-long-distance between ringing and resighting, but interest when I discovered that most were ringed as adult birds at a series of catches in 1996. This means that the older birds I see are now well in excess of 13 years old - that's no mean feat in itself... It's also just less than half of the current longevity record for a British-ringed Brent, which is a whopping 28 years, 2 months and 12 days between ringing and recovery!

A nice view, if not a nice photo, comparing an adult (centre, no pale fringes to the coverts - the back is a smooth charcoal grey) and bird of the year, with obvious pale fringes making a couple of whitish bars across the coverts. Notice also the lack of a neck collar on the young birds.

Saturday, at Powderham. Eye-candy in the middle, but no fewer than seven colour-ringed birds out of a flock of 250. The difficult thing is getting the numbers when they're faffing about behind the tussocks. A more challenging site...!

Over the years, I have also seen the odd bird which was ringed in Holland (like G1Y- and GRY9) and a couple that were ringed - excitingly - on their breeding grounds, in western Russia (like yellow JX and OKRD) - some 4,500km away from the Exe. So the birds which have survived so long, wintering on the Exe, are flying a corridor 4,500km long, twice every year. As well as all that incidental travel within their home and winter territories. I know it's not the same league as Arctic Tern and Manx Shearwater, but it's pretty good stuff nonetheless.

It's also fun to see that 'my' birds are often seen at other sites during their migration: the Waddensee between Holland, Germany and Denmark is the main place, but they also occasionally drop in further east in England.

They'll be off to Russia again soon. Hopefully they'll be back next winter!

In other news, a small group of us froze our butts off at Topsham Rec. on Saturday evening to do our annual gull count. Birds dropped in from an amazing height, presumably on the back of very clear skies and a tailwind, but numbers were not great. And boooooy was it cold work, standing around like that!