Oldcrest and carr

Back out to do some ringing - it seems like forever since the last session, though in fact it's only (only!) a month. My glamorous assistant cried off late on Saturday evening, so I had the site to myself - and as wife and child are living it up in Germany for a couple of days, I had the luxury of no guilty conscience at work by the end of the session...

Having only filled feeders the morning before, I had little expectation of being overrun by birds and this proved to be the case. Sure, Blue Tit and Coal Tit made up the bulk of the catch, but there was plenty to appreciate. For instance: a Song Thrush. We only catch one or two each year on site, and have as yet had no recaptures or recoveries. The site is very edge-of-range - on the fringe of the high moors - but there are always a few pairs breeding in the adjacent conifers. What will happen when the conifers are felled and replaced by (presumably) native broadleaves? That will be interesting!

Old Coal Tit. Given the text in the Helm family guide (Tits, Nuthatches and Treecreepers), this ought to be a male, with such an extensive bib. We just don't catch them in the breeding season to be able to confirm!

For the first time, a Sparrowhawk managed to stay in the net. We've had a couple of near-misses with this species in the past: a male low in the net last autumn managed to extricate himself before we could reach the net, and the year before that one left its dinner in the bottom of a net, in the shape of a freshly-plucked and trimmed Woodpigeon pullus. Yesterday, however, I turned the corner to a net and there was a male Sparrowhawk, neatly cushioned in the bottom shelf and glaring balefully up at me. I carefully disentangled him and took him back to the car to be ringed, measured and weighed - I wonder if he's the same bird as previously escaped?

Sparrowhawk. Talons safely the other side of my mitt.

The Willow Tits at the southern end of the site appear to have paired up. Both were in the net together and flew off together when weighed and released. It would be nice if they managed to breed successfully this year - last year's nest failed. The male was originally caught in October 2010, so is now a very experienced bird within his territory.

Yesterday produced a handful of experienced individuals: two Coal Tits which were originally caught in January 2011 and a Goldcrest first caught in September 2011. The latter is always somewhat impressive: that a bird which weighs in the same as a sheet of A4 paper, or a 2p piece should survive year-round on Dartmoor is somewhat admirable. The longevity record for Goldcrest in the UK is a whole 4 years, 2 months 24 days, so this one's got a while to go before he reaches the record, but he's doing well nonetheless!

With it being a quiet day, there was also opportunity to admire the lichens and mosses on the trees around the car, to seek out the tiny red stars of Hazel flowers and to relish the willow carr - such an under-appreciated habitat. There are patches of carr woodland on site which are breathtakingly rainforest-like. Walk into them and the air is redolent with the fresh damp greenness of the carr. Old fallen willow stems snake across the ground, starring out from the original tree's base with linear thickets of young poles growing vertically from them. The old stems are felted with a luxuriance of mosses and lichens, whilst the young stems remain grey and smooth. The boggy ground between the wood is a verdant carpet of plants bewildering in its complexity of form and colour so that the eye just sees green at first, but has to then pull back, refocus and concentrate to appreciate the subtle beauty. Drips and drops fall all around and everything seems to pulse with moistness: whatever you touch, wherever you step, wherever your hand lands...

Hazel flower.

Masses of elf-cups, Cladonia pyxidata (I think) reach up from old willow stems in the carr

Another Cladonia lichen, this time coniocraea amidst a mat of Hypnum mosses

Drips and drops - decomposition is rife within the carr. This seemed a better picture than the remains of the frog.

Peltigera lichens and the moss Kindbergia praelonga grow over one another on the ground.

Redpoll redux

Way back in the mists of 2011, we ringed a shed-load of Lesser Redpolls up on the edge of the moors. Somewhere around 250 of them over the course of the autumn. OK, it's hardly the stuff to make an observatory staff quake in their boots, but for our first full season at the site, it was something pretty special. Within that mix were a couple of local retraps - all from round about the moor's edge and none of them from more than 10km away - and that seemed to be about that... Then, the following spring, we received news that one of our birds had been caught in someone's house in northern France - always an exciting moment when one of 'your' birds is traced to another country, and this autumn we've discovered that another of 'our' class of 2011 has been recaptured twice by a local ringer on the south-west side of the moor, this time a bird on a breeding territory. So we know that some of the birds we ringed that autumn most likely came from the local area, whilst some presumably originated elsewhere in Europe...

Since that autumn, we've caught rather fewer Lesser Redpolls: in fact fewer than 10 each season. None of those we caught in 2011 have been recaptured on site either, though there are generally a few Lesser Redpoll around throughout the year.

Then, a couple of weekends back, we caught half a dozen Lesser Redpolls on one day... and this:

It's big...

...it's got a socking great pale rump...

...(just like the linked blog above, you can see some wear on the tail and primary tips which help age it as a bird of the year)...

...no brown on the flanks...

....it's grey (this photo © Judith Read)...

...it's still got no brown on the flanks (this photo © Judith Read)...

...and it's got white wing-bars (this photo also © Judith Read). Note also the two visible retained juvenile greater coverts. Award yourself an extra mark if you didn't have to look the feather tract up.

'It' is, of course (roll eyes and sigh, go on) a Common Redpoll, Carduelis flammea - one of those northern birds so controversially (?) split out during some taxonomic reorganisation back in the late 90s-early 2000s. You can see most everything you ought to want to to identify this one as a Common: white wing-bars, pale rump, cold brown and grey tones overall. You can't hear it, because I haven't got the kit to record it, but rest assured it even sounded a little deeper-voiced when it called.

The description's in the post to the county recorder...

Late springing

It's been a funny old patch here in Devon lately. The weather's oscillated between spells of glorious spring sunshine, when the butterflies and bees crowd the flowers and the birds frantically get on with either breeding or migrating, and patches of foul, blattering, cold rain where everything seems to batten down the hatches and take cover for the duration.

Because the weather's been so inconsistent - and I've discovered it's not as easy to be spontaneous with a small baby in the house - we've not been out ringing at all in April, so Sunday was a great opportunity to get out for the morning. Opening the car door, I was greeted by the sound of a Grasshopper Warbler reeling away steadily in the adjacent Rhos pasture like this (click the arrows to hear the song). I opened the nets to the sound of Blackcaps and a Garden Warbler making their presence known to their rivals, and the morning was spent ringing to the accompaniment of Willow Warblers (perhaps the sweetest of all the UK's summer sounds), a Redstart and a couple of Cuckoos. Being mid-spring, there wasn't much to ring, but a healthy number of Willow Warblers included at least two ringed as adults this time last year.

Bird of the day was, however, not even a bird, but a particularly fine female Adder, basking complacently on a Molinia tussock: she waited patiently until I'd taken a number of photos, then resumed her interrupted relaxation without batting an eyelid. Not that she could bat an eyelid, but I speak figuratively...

American Skunk-cabbage - a colourful addition to the local streams and as yet apparently without the drawbacks of things like Himalayan Balsam or Japanese Knotweed. It does, however, as the name suggests, smell quite rank.

A fully-open flower, wafting a gentle stench on the breeze

And this one's done the business. It's no coincidence that it seems to be pollinated by flies...

Garden Warbler

The star of the show!

A very good-looking snake indeed...

Ring in the new...

A milestone today - our first ringing session of the year (non-garden) and somehow there's a need to include Sabina in this experience. I set off early with David and Peter, opening the nets early enough to make it worthwhile, whilst Na brought the youngest member of the group along at about 10 (bang-on 10 in fact: German punctuality strikes again!).

It was a typical day for this time of year: a couple of feeders are occasionally topped up by one or another of us so that there is some focus to the birds during the winter, and consequently much of the catch is Blue, Coal and Great Tits. However, we continue to accrue some useful information about the number of Poecile tits on site: three Willow Tits caught, two recaptures and one new bird; all of them last year's juveniles.

Willow Tit (Poecile montana kleinschmidti). A rather small and neat bib on this bird, but you can see many of the key features which indicate Willow rather than Marsh: clean white cheeks, strong bill (and longer than Marsh) with no clear white spot at the base of the upper mandible, a rather dull and extensive black cap, a hint of a pale panel in the wing - and if you look carefully, a very different tail pattern than you'll see on Marsh.

A closer look at that tail - notice that the outermost feathers are rather shorter than the innermost, and that there is a clear view of most of the feather tips at regular intervals between the extremes. On Marsh, this would not be the case; almost all the feathers being similar in length except for the outermost pair, which are rather shorter.

A bit overexposed, but here you can see that nice pale panel in the wing... as well as seeing how long the cap is.

We also caught two new Marsh Tits, a female Reed Bunting and an unusually-marked male Great Spotted Woodpecker. The woodpecker appeared to be one of last year's young as well, with new glossy black greater coverts and mantle feathers contrasting very strongly with a set of unusually pale outer greater coverts and primary coverts. You might also be able to pick out in the picture that the secondaries also appear rather washed-out.

Young male Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major). Those pale wing feathers stand out a mile in the hand, but would be almost impossible to see in the field, I think. Would be fascinating to catch him again after the next moult and see what's happened there.

Female Reed Bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus). The amount of wear on the tail in particular suggested to us that this was a bird born last year.

A toast to Redpolls

A short blog to share some pictures of some Lesser Redpolls we've been catching at our Dartmoor site.

Tail and primary tips of a bird born this year

Tail and primary tips of an adult

 

You can see from the pictures above how much fun it can be to age these birds: in effect you're looking for evidence of wear on the tips of the tail feathers and primaries. You'll also notice the broad fringes and darker base-colour of the adult bird's feathers: this is basically due to the better quality feathers that adults grow, compared with the feathers that young birds grow in the nest.

A nice crisp adult (perhaps a female) with a good hint of a pale rump.

A particularly dark young bird with very pale retained greater coverts (the white feather-tips across the wing)

A full-on adult male, ringed in 2010 at a nearby site by a friend, and retrapped by us recently. Not the best picture, unfortunately, but he was pink everywhere: cheeks, chin, rump, breast, flanks... smart.

Serendipity

An entirely unrelated photograph.

We spent today (Saturday 2nd Oct) doing some unashamedly lazy walking, birding and twitching, mainly on the River Otter, in east Devon. Too many people at Slapton to make it worthwhile joining in, so we stayed away and stuck a couple of nets up in the garden for the first time this autumn (result: one Chiffchaff, one Wren, one Dunnock, one Long-tailed Tit and a couple of Blue, Coal & Great Tits - not astounding, but nice). When the birds dried up - which they did quite quickly, we headed out to the Otter.

The estuary was packed with gulls, mainly Herring and Black-headed, all loafing and bathing in the fresh water before the turn of the tide. A single colour-marked Herring Gull was an RSPCA project bird, but not an individual I've seen before. The code looks like it should be a reasonably old bird, so might be interesting.

Peacock butterfly - we're coming to the end of the butterfly season now - these and Red Admirals (see below) are the bulk of what is still flying.

The wet fields to the west of the footpath held a smattering of Teal, the drakes beginning to moult out of their dowdy eclipse plumage. Scattered around them were a loose flock of Pied/White Wagtails, a smattering of Meadow Pipits and several Yellow Wagtails - always nice to get good views of these in Devon. Further on, a trio of Black-tailed Godwits were belly-deep in the water, probing away for invertebrates. We strolled on round to the mouth of the river, then sat awhile and admired the gulls (I admired them; Na grappled with the ID of immature 'poxies' - not a fan). A couple of moulting drake Wigeon appeared, and the beach was rippling with Pied/White wagtails and pipits, all pausing for a while on the stones to feed, then heading off west along the coast in a flurry.

We tracked upriver to Otterton, then as we headed back in the blazing (har har) sunshine, the trio of Glossy Ibis(es) appeared at the back of a field, energetically preening and flapping. Up 'scopes for Naomi's forty-somethingth new species of the year, and we spent an enjoyable 10 minutes watching them cleaning up.

Red Admiral butterfly

The previous weekend was better still in some regards: Na chose to head off to London for a girly weekend with the gang, so I spent the weekend down at Slapton, for a bit of a change. Shame you can't do sarcasm on screen. Anyway; I arrived later than anticipated, and was met with a message that Nik was off putting some nets up, so why didn't I go and put some others up? The hint was duly taken, and I headed up the ley - only to scare up a Corncrake from the long grass. A very satisfying thing, as it's not really something you expect to see in Devon these days. This was followed up the next day with a Great Reed Warbler in the nets: the first ever caught on site, and a bit of a shock to come across in the autumn! Serendipity indeed...

 Great Reed Warbler. Basically, it's a big Reed Warbler, isn't it?

Slapton sunrise. Note the mist-line along the bay - this seems to be, rather romantically, where the sewage outfall lies.

D is for...

Downpour.

I spent a day doing some assessment work with a colleague, Clare, last week. We spent the entire day trawling the cliffs and beach between Baggy Point and Saunton, on the North Devon coast. I use the word trawl advisedly, as it didn't arf rain... Despite the unpleasant conditions, we found large quantities of Autumn Squill along the cliff, as well as some exceedingly unperturbed sheep.

 Sheep contemplates pursuing the ultimate aim in an ovine life: suicide.

 Sheep stoically chewing over the remains of some clifftop vegetation on Baggy Point.

Didymodon cordatus
Further along the cliffs is the main UK population of a small moss, called Cordate Beard-moss. It seems to be happy, amongst a very large population of Scrambled-egg lichen. A bit of the nationally scarce Sea Stock Matthiola sinuata enlivened a superbly soggy end to the working day.

A random picture of two lasses watching the surf - and the surfers at Saunton Sands.

Disease.
A stark reminder at Slapton that disease is a part of life for everything: we came across this unfortunate juvenile Blackbird, which is probably not much longer for this world. Not only showing some gross tumours, but the skin around the head was crawling with ectoparasites - a veritable garden of delights for a parasitologist, but I'm not one of those. Don't think we'll be seeing that bird again! If you're of a sensitive nature, don't scroll any further along this posting, please.

 Whatever the cause, this is a pretty grotesque set of growths on a wild bird.

Written to music by the Dresden Dolls...

Having possibly done something good in a previous life, I was allowed out of the office, with the express task of whipping through some basic monitoring at Prawle Point, one of my favourite places in the country. Sometimes life can be kind...! The day seemed to have been badly chosen at the outset, as when I woke up it was sheeting with rain, and the journey down was completed through a series of increasingly hefty showers. I wasn't worried though, because - in contrast to South Brent - it never rains at Prawle. True to expectations, the drop off the South Hams plateau to the coast was accompanied by a general brightening of the day and a lifting of the spirits.

We set out on our task in a stiff westerly breeze, which blustered around us and constantly threatened to remove our work, our coats and ourselves, if we were not paying close attention... Ignoring a couple of Cirl Buntings in the nearby thicket, we concentrated on the cliffs, finding such delights as the nationally scarce Autumn Squill, the dirt-common Rock Samphire and the variably rare Rock Sea-lavender (rarity depends very much on the lines you draw between taxa). We also managed to find a handful of clumps of the exciting (no, honest!) Golden Hair Lichen, which looks to me rather like a pan-scourer which has been steeped in saffron.

Teloschistes flavicans. Golden Hair Lichen.

 Autumn Squill (Scilla autumnalis). The purple one.

Today was another day at Slapton, where ringing continued apace for the season. A bright and early start meant we were in the right place at the right time to catch two Kingfishers and two Magpies on the opening round of the nets. You may find it perverse, but we were rather more interested in catching two Magpies than the Kingfishers... in 50 years of ringing at Slapton, only 7 Magpies have been caught before, whereas we catch up to 10 Kingfishers a season on a reasonable year. All context, you see...

Magpies. What more can you say? The bird on the right of the left-hand picture isn't going blind, it's flicking the nictating membrane over it's eye. Don't know what AJ's bird grabbed, but I'm sure it wasn't as painful as it looks...!

Half an hour later, during a walk round the nets, there was a squeal of anguish from the other side of the open water on the higher ley. Looking up and across the water, I was just in time to see the female Marsh Harrier standing firmly on a juvenile Coot, which was the source of the squeal. Unfortunately - or not: depends on your point of view, I suppose - the harrier lost her bottle when she saw me, so flopped off north up the ley to harass something else.

The rest of the ringing didn't produce any great surprises, though a healthy number of Reed and Cetti's Warblers were ringed again.

Cetti's Warbler. A small one.

Tufted Duck update: the brood of 9 seems to have been reduced in size, but a further three (count 'em) broods were out and about, all of which look as if they hatched at much the same time. So, that meant a brood of 5 tiddlers on the channel between the leys, a brood of 4 tiddlers and a single tiddler on the graveyard pool, and a further brood of 4 not-quite-such-tiddlers on the graveyard with them; I'm choosing to assume that the latter are the birds from 2 weekends back, though this is purely lazy speculation on my part. It'd be good if some of them manage to survive the various predators around the ley and get to adult size.

Female Tufted Duck with downy ducklings. This is the girl on the channel, with proper tiddlers.

Fuer Denise...

It's been a fun couple of weeks! The autumn ringing season's started up, so summer's out the way and we can concentrate on the fun of migration again - only semi-joking. Slapton started up last week, with a good first day - 133 new birds and another 20-odd retraps from previous years. Included within this total were about 25 new Ceti's Warblers - they seem to have had a decent year to put it mildly. Not included was this little baby: a Garden Warbler which could barely flutter along the path ahead of us. Carefully put into the scrub and left to call it's parents in, it was last seen chirping its way towards the sea, along the line of willow beside the road.

Juvenile Garden Warbler 

Female Reed Bunting. An old bird which is beginning to develop male patterns and colours in it's head markings

We were also pleased to see a brood of no fewer than 9 very young Tufted Duck heading down the channel with their mother. At the edge of the open ley, the whole family began to learn how to take the business of being a Tufted Duck very seriously indeed: nine fuzzy little ducklings attempting to dive for perhaps the first time was highly entertaining! Several managed to get the hang of getting under quite rapidly, but had problems staying under - their down must trap a lot of air - so would resurface with so much speed that they left the water entirely. Others struggled with the concept of diving: they would take the proper Tufted Duck leap into the water, but misjudge their strength and do something of a half-somersault, going under on their backs instead of headfirst...

Tufted Duck brood

Midweek I helped lead a Nightjar walk on the edge of Dartmoor. We met up at 9:30 p.m. and strolled across the heath at a birder's pace, making all of 200metres per hour. After a diminishing chorus of Mistle Thrush and Blackbird, with a smattering of Willow Warbler and Redpoll, the light drew out into a fine sunset and the first Nightjar began singing from some distance down the valley - sounding rather like a faint two-stroke engine, churring up and down in tone. As usual with the first of the evening, he soon petered out into silence, but then a male appeared from below us and slowly sauntered past us, wings flicking like some giant tropical swallowtail butterfly. He circled round us at about 50m distance in the fading light, then disappeared back into the valley in the same silent fashion. After a little while, two more appeared from above us, chasing each other around and about in near-darkness. A third bird briefly joined in and we were treated to a spectacular display of nocturnal aerobatics and the rather treefrog-like 'gwoink' flightcalls, with accompanying song from a couple of more distant males.

Green 'unripe tomato' spider, found along the edge of the heath

Sunset over Trendlebere Down

Today was spent on a speculative attempt to confirm the presence of breeding Willow Tit on Dartmoor. Several of the group met up at a site where a couple of the survey group had heard birds earlier in the year and put up a couple of nets to ring. Bizarrely we managed to catch a single juvenile Willow Tit, as well as seeing/hearing at least three others in the same area. By far the best result yet on any site, and finally proof-positive that they still cling on on the edge of the moors. A very instructive bird to see in the hand too!

Juvenile Willow Tit. Note particularly the bull-neck, the long black cap reaching far down the nape, the lack of a pale spot on the bill and the chunkiness of the bill as well.

Finally, some pictures of the garden, as the title goes. (Cue music)