When I was a kid our milk was frequently attacked by marauding gangs of Great Tits and Blue Tits. For younger, perhaps puzzled, readers this was a long time ago in the days when doorstep deliveries of milk were the norm and milk was full fat and the ‘cream’ was noticeable in floating to the…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
An interesting paper
These results show that shooting has a greater non-lethal effect on crows than trapping. While trapping may be a more efficient way of removing crows than shooting, shooting not only reduces the number of nuisance animals directly, but also affects their behaviour and habitat use so that damage is reduced indirectly. https://bioone.org/journals/Ornithological-Science/volume-19/issue-2/osj.19.125/Alert-and-Flight-Initiation-Distances-of-Crows-in-Relation-to/10.2326/osj.19.125.short
Pallids in Pas-de-Calais
I’m interested in Pallid Harriers for a number of reasons; they are very beautiful birds, they are expanding their range dramatically westwards in an interesting manner and I have a bet with my friend Ben Koks (which I will be happy to lose) that Pallids aren’t going to have bred in the UK by the…
An interesting paper
This paper is interesting but it draws an odd policy conclusion in the abstract even though not in the discussion. It suggests that high levels of generalist predators may be a problem for ground-nesting birds in particular (not earth-shattering) but then in the abstract says ‘If we value our ground‐nesting bird species, consideration needs to…
Swifts – counting the days
I’ve seen Swifts on an unbroken run of 84 days this year since 1 May (and on one early date of 19 April). All of those days, bar one last week when we were away in Scotland, were in the skies above our home. I am pretty sure that this has been a very good…
Pallid Harriers breed in Czech Republic for first time
Pallid Harriers bred in the Czech Republic for the first time this year – raising three young. This doesn’t sound as close to the UK as the Netherlands (bred in 2017 and 2019) or Spain (bred 2019) but the number of outlier breeding records grows all the time. I assume there is no breeding pair…
July British Birds
Prof Andrew Barker of the Lothian and Borders Raptor Study Group sounds like a bright guy. His whole-page letter in BB hits several nails on their heads. In particular his long experience of chatting to grouse shooting interests lead him, as mine leads me, to the view that attempts at conciliation with grouse shooting interests…
We’re all ageing…
We’re all ageing but in birders’ parlance this word often means working out the age of a bird (often from details of its plumage). And sexing means telling the sex of a bird likewise (whatever else you may have thought). When British Birds arrived at my swanky house this week, as well as an excellent…
Guest blog – Tracking Robins in the Soundscape by Murray Marr
I’ve been measuring the seasonal vocal outputs of various songbirds on Midhurst Common’s woodlands in West Sussex, since 2003. This was when, on a whim, part of a regular dog walk started to include ten minutes of counting of singing individuals of each species within a series of short time frames. I do this simple,…
Those Birdtrack House Sparrows revisited
You may think that I have a ‘thing’ about this, maybe an unhealthy obsession, but it’s just something that interests me. I noticed that the reporting rates of many birds on the excellent Birdtrack system had changed during lockdown, and in predictable ways. Birdtrack was telling us about our behaviour as birders as much as…