This follows yesterday’s update.
Louise writes: At the end of a tough twelve hours of lock-down bird race, I thought I’d give a summary.
At least 30 people participated (the data entry is online, so I dont know all the answers yet) across Cambridgeshire. The top count for 11 hours of home-based birding and an hour out for a walk is curently a whopping 75, assisted by the observer living close to a gravel pit. I managed 44 species, probably close to the average. Most of us who have revealed our totals so far and are based in villages surrounded by arable managed about 45 species, those in Cambridge a little lower total.
We set the date in advance, and possibly chose the worst weather day of the weekend – the cold northerlies precluded long skywatches from the garden for many, and the inevitability of several hours of adding nothing to the list was part of the game, really. Many of the participants thanked me for organising something to give them purpose to a day of being home-based birding.
I wrote part 1 after a couple of hours. I added not very much to the list till about 3pm, when I got an afternoon surge of half-a-dozen extra species. Some of my highlights were really close views of stock doves and feral pigeons, right by the garden, feeding in the newly-germinated arable. They really are remarkably smart birds. The peak count of stock dove was 10 together, a pretty good count for a species which has declined in the UK, but still seems to do pretty well round us. I then began to wonder about the feral pigeons – were they racers?… no rings on any of them, but they seemed to be a tightly-knit group and I had to admit to myself that I had no idea whether racers all had rings.
There were species I should have had but didn’t – long-tailed tit, red-legged partridge, and also lapwing and corn bunting breeding in the parish that I didn’t find. Several things such as song thrush, coal tit, chiffchaff, took my allotted walk hour into the village to find, one of the annoyances of living outside of a village; some species normal to many just aren’t regulars.
Buzzards became the focus of the afternoon. There is a pair nesting not far away, and between the two of us in the house, we saw probably six different birds – two pairs and two other birds; unclear whether they were paired or just chancing it. The cooler weather meant that buzzards were having to work harder, not very high up and barely visible, but nearer to us, displaying and arguing. We also have a Harris hawk on the loose in the village – he has been around for several years and spends most of his spring hours trying to impress the female buzzards, resulting, as today, in many clashes with the male buzzards. We also saw him carrying a stick, but the highlight was a full, tumbling talon-clash with the male buzzard close to the nest site.
Apart from refining many of my thoughts about arable farming (maybe I’ll return to that later) I learnt that it’s amazing how far away birds can be picked out with a telescope, its actually surprising how many trees there are in an arable landscape, how easy it is to spot a carrion crow nest, and also just how interesting buzzards can be on a lock-down afternoon. And tomorrow, I will fully analyse the number of species recorded in the county – I wonder how many more than 75 it will be – there must have been a few species not seen by the front-runner that were seen or heard by others.
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Louise, at the current rate of expansion, I wonder how much longer you will be able to say you are ‘outside Cambridge’?
With the farmers still playing catch up after the wet winter many of our fields are still being ploughed and sown. I guess the same with you. Early dog walk yesterday saw a pair of homeless Oysters and several lapwings wondering what the hell had happened. Really quite distressing.
Skylark walk his morning. Three pairs Saturday morning with a couple of hangers on. This morning nothing. Hopefully they will all try later.
I have always thought that one of the joys post bird race is the looking at the total species seen and where. I used to take part in a local new year bird race in Harrogate for a number of years, totals varied hugely between years, much of which was weather dependent but there were always some surprises. Winning totals varied over the years between 82 and just under 100 with I think the highest total species seen at around 110. It was always good fun. I wonder what the best bird seen in your race was Louise, Corn Bunting would have be a very fine find in ours.
Our side of Cambridge has the barrier of the M11 between me and it, plus the western side is the more expensive side of town with no expansion plan and landscape charities owning much of the farmland both side of M11….. apart from a ne w park & ride which I am desperately in favour of, not sure what else.. its mostly village epansion. The big one hanging over me is the east-west rail.. the oxford-bedford-cambridge line, which I am in favour of in principle… we live about 1/2 mile from the old station in what is now university radioastronomy (another reason expansion stalled – our house was the core of a new village in the 1930s next to station.. its an isolated row of 2×10 houses). The proposed ‘new route’ was drawn with a crayon about 5 miles wide, encompassing here but we have simply no idea where it will be put, and doubt there will be a station. The consultation evenings were cancelled at lockdown, as was all the ground survey work.
We dont have many lapwings here, but much of the parish is in sympathetic arable and there are 2 pairs. Most of the crops were sown about 3 weeks ago or in the autumn – it hasn’t rained since the begining march. I am mulling over another piece on the farmed landscape………
Louise, Re stock Doves, round Camb you probably have vining peas (these are repeatedly sown for a sequence which is useful] and other crops they like in the arable rotation. I saw 20 in one vining pea field. They also love RSPB Turtle dove supplement and watching them arrive they will travel a long way for it, until the OSR comes on stream then they disappear. Before that they also join the Turtle dove at the garden peanut heart feeder. The TD of course usually does not bother much with the field feeding supplement.
Back to my hobby horse of nest sites. Stock doves use owl boxes in Suffolk. They also once staked a claim to a hole under the veranda roof of a log cabin that I had left open to make sure the repair was water tight. Unfortunately I had to close it and move them on early to start somewhere else as I was afraid they would desert when the visitors arrived. My point is there are a lot of artificial sites they use, so should we provide more as old farm buildings disappear etc. I must admit there are still a lot of unused owl boxes.