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,…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
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…
Heading to autumn
Comments Off on Heading to autumn
If Spring ends on 19 May, as I think it does for me, then Summer is about to morph into Autumn. I know there is the whole of July and August that many people would regard as Summer, but the birds are telling me that Autumn is fast approaching. Sitting in my garden the other…
It might be you, or me, but actually it’s Mairi.
I’ve been checking my garden, and the local patches of open space with grass, to see whether amongst all the Starlings and their noisy hungry young, there might be a Rose-coloured Starling (aka Rosy Pastor). And so it was with some envy that I received this photo of two Rose-coloured Starlings in my inbox from…
Vulture flights
Comments Off on Vulture flights
Check out the Saving Asia’a Vultures from Extinction website for information on the movements of released captive-bred and captive -reared White-rumped Vultures from Nepal, how COVID-19 is affecting fieldwork and the discovery of a breeding colony of White-rumped Vultures in Laos.
The Woodcock’s world
This paper, from GWCT scientists and the Woodcock Network, is a fascinating insight into Woodcock behaviour and is another example of the great value of satellite telemetry in moving on our understanding of bird movements by leaps and bounds. There is a declining UK breeding population of Woodcocks which in winter is greatly augmented by…
Cuckoos – good year or bad year?
My farmer friend Duncan told me he hadn’t yet heard a Cuckoo this year when I saw him this morning – and I told him that, for the first time since 2014, I’d heard one from the garden. Such are the sharing of bird observations that happen all over and which tend to form a…
Black birders week #blackbirdersweek
This week is black birders week – a mainly North American thing. And, by chance, it comes at the time when there are riots across the USA after the death of George Floyd at the hands, or knee, of a white policeman. Last week I read about this event in Central Park where a black…
Lockdown and Birdtrack again
Comments Off on Lockdown and Birdtrack again
The Birdtrack reporting rate graphs for Britain and Ireland for two species show a pretty convincing impact of lockdown on avian reporting rates – as suggested in an earlier blog post here. Here is the graph for House Sparrow for this year and the historical data: So this shows that for the early part of…
Cuckoo
I was bathing in bird song again this morning – from about 410am. A Cuckoo sang from 415am – 445am. Probably because it is a low-pitched song it was quite difficult to locate its direction. The sound to which I listened was clearly bouncing off the wall of my own house because that was very…