Super Shovelers

It's been a fairly mild week which means our winter visitors are likely happy with their choice to spend the season in the UK. This week I paid a visit to Blashford Lakes which is probably at its busiest time of the year in terms of bird life.

I was lucky to get very close to one of the trees cormorants like to perch in and this resulted in a photo I'm really pleased with.

The UK has an internationally important wintering population of these birds, some 41,000 birds1.Unlike other birds they are not too particular about their habitat and will happily go to freshwater lakes like at Blashford, estuaries or the coast- anywhere with a good supply of fish is OK with them. 

I also saw a few of what is becoming my favorite waterfowl, shovelers. 

These birds are so odd-looking. Females look much like female mallard only with an enormous bill whereas males have a beautiful green head. They use their remarkable bill to forage for aquatic invertebrates2. The bill has 'lamellae' on the edge which are comb-like structures that act as sieves- this allows the birds to skim invertebrates from the water's surface. This adaptation means they don't have to compete with food resources with other ducks. 

Again the UK is an important place for these birds as 20% of North West Europe's population call it home3. 

Another spot was this lovely little grebe. 

Little Grebes are superb swimmers and pursue fish and invertebrates underwater up to a depth of one metre4. They are buoyant due to not having a tail and reappear from dives like a cork. Like other grebes though they are not good at walking and nest right at the water's edge for this reason. 

It's not all waterfowl at Blashford of course- I also spotted this green woodpecker. 

This bird was almost certainly feeding on ants here, which take up the vast majority of their diet5. It probes it's long beak into the ground and licks up ants and their larvae. Their tongues are long, about 10cm- so long in fact that they have to wrap around the skull in order to fit in the head6!

Moving elsewhere, I spotted a pair of goosander when I was walking past the River Avon this week. 

These birds use their long serrated bills to catch fish- they especially like trout and salmon7. They also have been known to eat virtually any other aquatic creatures they can find from molluscs, crustaceans, insect larvae and amphibians to small mammals and birds on occasion8. 

When walking in the New Forest this week, I came across a sizeable herd of fallow deer which included one white individual. 

Normally fallow deer are light brown and spotty but they coat does darken in the winter. Even so, you would normally expect to see pale spots on these deer but this does vary between populations. It's only the distinctive tails that tell me these are definitely fallow deer. 

You might imagine the white deer to be an albino but actually white is fairly common in deer as it's simply natural variation9. I suppose it's similar to humans having ginger hair in that it's a less common variation but a still a relatively high proportion of individuals have it.

That's all for today but I hope you have a good Christmas and I'll be back next week with my end of year round-up.

1: RSPB- Cormorant

2: Ducks Unlimited: Northern Shoveler

3: RSPB- Shoveler

4: BirdsUc: Little Grebe
5: RSPB: Green Woodpecker
6: Robinson, R.A. "Green Woodpecker" BirdFacts. BTO
7: RSPB: Goosander
8: del Hoyo, J. Elliott, A, Sargatal, J (eds) (1992) Handbook of the Birds of the World Vol 1. Barcelona: Lynx Edicions. pp. 626
9: BDS: Fallow Deer

Winter Wonders

Yesterday I visited one of my favorite nature reserves, Lymington-Keyhaven. The reserve comes alive at this time of year as visitors arrive to enjoy our relatively mild winters.

It didn't take long at all until I spotted the first wigeon of the day.

Though small numbers of wigeon do breed in the UK (in Scotland and the North of England), all the wigeon around here are winter visitors from Russia, Scandinavia and Iceland1. The key identifying feature of wigeon are there bright yellow forehead, though this is only the case in males- females of most of our duck species look very similar. 

Also on the reserve were a flock of brent geese- whilst I have seen these birds at the reserve before, yesterday's visit was the closest I've seen them to the footpath on top of the sea wall. 

These brent geese come from a long way North, the Taymyr peninsula on the Arctic coast of Siberia. They fly some 5000 kilometres to reach us, cutting over Finland and going around the southern shore of the Baltic Sea on their journey2. They spend the winter feeding on eelgrass and on crops in nearby fields3. There are several subspecies of brent geese- these are dark-bellied. Scientists are divided upon whether these subspecies are genetically different enough to be identified as separate species altogether- at the the moment they remain one species. 

One further migratory bird I spotted was this greenshank. 

I'm lucky to live in one of the few parts of the UK where you can see greenshank in the winter. Many pass through the east coast and they can be seen in Cornwall and Devon but the only place further west than that in England is around the solent4. Indeed, we are lucky to have greenshank this far North at all during winter as the vast majority spend their winters in Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Australasia. 

So why do so many migratory birds spend winter at Lymington-Keyhaven? The reserve contains both a salt marsh and mudflats which are home to the invertebrates that these birds need to eat in vast numbers to survive5. There are also large creeks between the salt marsh which are perfect nursery areas for fish, again providing food for many of these species. The salt marsh also sits behind the sea wall which means these birds have their ideal coastal habitat yet are sheltered from the worst of the winter weather. 

Of course, I didn't just see migrants, I also saw plenty of resident birds. The highlight of these was the kingfisher which seemed to follow me around the reserve. 

Kingfishers are highly territorial birds- this it because they have to eat around 60% of their own body weight every day and so have to have control of a suitable stretch of river 6. They will fight off intruders, grabbing their beak and trying to hold it under the water. Territories are somewhere between half a mile and two miles long so it's likely this bird is the king of the Lymington-Keyhaven.

To conclude today I just wanted to refer back to a post from a few weeks ago. I speculated that 2017 had been a good year for bullfinch numbers. Well the BTO's BirdTrack survey has found hard data to support my own observations. This graph shows just how high the number of bullfinch sightings this year has been compared to usual 7. 

It's always nice to have my own observations made official! That's all for today but I'll hopefully be out and about lots over the festive season so there will be more soon!

1: RSPB- Wigeon  

2: Wildlife Trusts: Lymington & Keyhaven Marshes

3: RSPB: The Migration of Brent Geese

4: RSPB: Greenshank
5: RSPB New Forest Local Group: Lymington-Keyhaven Nature Reserve
6: Fry, H. Fry, K and Harris, A (1999) Kingfishers, Bee-eaters and Rollers. London: Christopher Helm. pp. 219-221
7: Twitter: BTO

Outakes

I have been suffering from various minor but unpleasant illnesses over the last few weeks and combined with the occasional bout of bad weather I haven't been able to travel much to see wildlife. Rather than have a second week running with no post I thought I'd share some things which didn't make the cut over the last few months.

The roe deer group near the new development is reliably within a few hundred metres of the same place. They are virtually a guaranteed sighting at the moment. I continue to be surprised just how close to the building site they venture.

Roe deer split into groups in the winter and so members of the herd near the Avon can be seen at various points along the river. I've counted up to 12 different individuals on one day, though there is likely to be many more out of sight. 

One of the birds I've been seeing most regularly in recent weeks is the familiar robin. 

Robins are associated with the festive season and there are several reasons for this. Robins probably ended up on Christmas cards because they were delivered by postmen who wore red jackets and were therefore nicknamed 'robins'1. There is also a more natural reason- robins are one of the few birds that can be found singing over the whole winter2. They do this to warn off intruders from their territory. The typical Christmas card image of a robin on top of a spade or a postbox really depicts a robin on a lookout post. 

You might imagine them as cute little birds but they are highly aggressive and males fight off intruders viciously. These fights regularly end in fatalities and it's thought as many as 10% of robin deaths in some areas comes from this fighting!

I recently spotted this blackbird having a drink out of a puddle. 

You might think of the humble blackbird as such a familiar bird that we know everything about them but we are still finding out so much. It's recently been discovered that as many as 12% of the blackbirds we see in winter have migrated here from Europe3. Ringing tells us they come from Finland, Sweden and Denmark with some just passing through and others staying for the season. 

A famous song opens with the line "Morning has broken like the first morning, blackbird has spoken like the first bird". The BTO have proved that blackbirds are the first birds to arrive at garden feeding stations on dark winter mornings 4. This is because of their large eye size which means their visual capability in low light is much better than other birds. This is the literal case of the early bird catches the worm. 

Finally, here's one more bird that I see all the time but rarely makes an appearance here, the local great crested grebe. 

These are now common birds but we were very close to losing them in the UK altogether. Towards the latter half of the 19th century there were as few as 32 breeding pairs 5. They were sadly hunted for their spectacular breeding plumage- as you can see, my grebe is now in it's paler winter plumage. It's thought that many grebes migrate to the UK but because they spend virtually their entire life in water they are tricky to ring and so we know little of their migration habits. 

I walk past the fishing lake at least once a week, much more often outside of winter, and so I know that this grebe is resident and is virtually always found on the lake. I've never seen any young grebes here and actually it's quite unusual to see more than this one individual on the lake at a time. 

That's all for today but I will hopefully be back soon with more!

1: BBC: Nature Really Wild Zone- Robin

2: BBC Nature: Robin

3: BTO: Blackbird

4: Ockendon, N., Davis, S.E., Toms, M.P. and Mukherjee, S. (2009) "Eye size and the time of arrival of birds at garden feeding stations in winter" Journal of Ornithology 150:903 pp.903-908 

5: BTO: Great Crested Grebe

Beautiful Bullfinches

The longer I write this blog the harder it becomes to find new species to share here, doubly so on my local patch. Sometimes though I get lucky and see a new species close to home that I haven't seen locally before.

Which leads me nicely onto this beautiful bird, a bullfinch.

These bright finches are UK residents and feed on seeds and buds(1)- this individual was flitting around the tree pecking at buds. The bright colour shows that this is a male but there was also a paler female present too. 

Now whilst I have seen the occasional bullfinch before I've never seen one in the area that I call my patch but I've actually seen quite a few over the last week or so. So why might this be?

Interestingly this year there have been a large number of the rarer hawfinch in the UK(2) and I don't think it's an enormous leap to suggest there may be a link here. The reasons cited for their larger numbers is twofold. Firstly, it's thought poor food supplies are forcing hawfinches to look further afield- like with the waxwings last winter, there are more hawfinches than food supplies. 

It's also been suggested that Storm Ophelia co-incided with their migration period, blowing them to the UK rather than down to the Mediterranean where they normally migrate too. Although they look fairly different there are a lot of similarities between hawfinches and bullfinches. They eat similar foods and whilst many bullfinches are resident, some do migrate south for the winter. 

Another small bird I saw recently that is a less common sighting was this treecreeper. 

Treecreepers feed on invertebrates on trees, starting near the base and working their way up the tree, using their stiff tail feathers for support(3). Unlike nuthatches, they only ever head up the tree, never down it. Treecreepers do leave their breeding territories at this time of year but they only venture as far as 20km(4).

A bird I see more often locally is the buzzard. 

As you can see, this is hardly the most rural of environments. The bird is sat on the perimeter fence of a local building site where a new housing estate is being built. It means this bird has lost a lot of it's hunting territory, though at least there is some field left in front of this fence. 

I was surprised to see another buzzard only a short distance from this one, sat on top of a bound of gravel from the groundworks. 

I don't see the buzzards often enough to be certain, but I think that the first one here is the parent of the second. Buzzards are territorial(5) so this second bird is most likely a descendent or the partner of the familiar bird I usually see.

I suspect the reason the buzzards gather here is the large number of rabbits on these fields. A row of bushes next to the path I walk along contains many entrances to warrens. 

Interestingly, the group of roe deer I shared last week seem to have taken to the site too, despite the noise of the building work nearby. 

I was concerned that the building work would affect the wildlife on the site significantly but there seems to be no sign of that so far. It just seems to have pushed the wildlife to the bit of land that remains field which happens to be right near the quiet footpath I walk on. It's still not clear if this land will eventually be built on and I hope it isn't because the wildlife need it. 

In the last fortnight the leaves have turned on the remaining trees leaving some stunning Autumnal colours. 

I think that's a fitting place to end- see you soon!

1: RSPB: Bullfinch

2: Kench, E. 20/11/17 'Look Out for this fantastic finch in a tree near you..." Eastern Daily Press

3: Snow, D and Perrins, C.M (eds) (1998) The Birds of the Western Palaearctic Concise Edition Oxford: OUP. ISBN: 0-19-854099-X pp. 1411-1416

4: RSPB: Treecreeper

5: RSPB: Buzzard- Breeding

November Notes

Let's begin this week with some of my local roe deer.

I was surprised to see how calm these deer appeared to be. They were only a few hundred metres away from a busy building site where groundwork was going on and this was only a few minutes after the loud canon that is fired for Remembrance day. Unlike other species of deer(1), the roe deer's rutting season has long since finished. They form small groups in the winter, as I saw(2). It is most common to see roe deer 'lying up' like this- they do this to ruminate (chew the cud) between feeding bouts.

Last week I visited Lymington-Keyhaven which is now starting to get busy with overwintering birds. I was also pleased to discover that the tide was out on my visit meaning there was a good opportunity to spot feeding waders.

There were several curlews feeding on the mud.

Last week I discussed how badly curlews are doing locally although you wouldn't know it at Lymington-Keyhaven. Every so often you could spot another large wader a little way out to shore and it would turn out to be a curlew. Unfortunately it's unlikely that many, if any, of these birds actually breed locally. Most of the UK's breeding curlew is in Scotland and the North of England(3) so it's likely these curlews are winter visitors, possibly only stopping off here on their way further south(4).

Here's a much smaller wader, a redshank.

Like curlews, redshank are generally found more in the North of the UK. Locally a few nest in the New Forest wetlands but most can be found at Lymington-Keyhaven- the Solent is an important area for them on the south coast(5).

Very close to the path I spotted this turnstone. 

The majority of waders have a duller plumage in the winter but turnstones have one of the more extreme changes, going from a bright chestnut brown to a dull grey(6). They get their name from the way they forage for food, often looking for invertebrates under stones. This individual didn't have to worry about stones though and was instead sifting it's way through the seaweed. 

I also saw a few species of duck at the reserve, including a few teal. 

Whilst some of the duck species that overwinter in the UK can be tricky to identify, teal are easy thanks to the green stripe on their head and the green wing feathers. The RSPB state that teal are resident in this part of the UK(7), though I've only ever seen them in the winter. Like the other birds mentioned today, teal are mainly found further north outside of winter. The UK is home to a significant percentage of the north-west European wintering population of these birds.

One final aquatic bird today and it's a canada goose that I see from time to time on my local fishing lake. It's easy to spot due to it's unusual plumage. 

It's difficult to know for certain what's going on here. The top of it's head should be fully black but here it looks like the black plumage hasn't formed properly. I think this goose is probably leucistic which means part of the plumage lacks the melanin pigment needed to produce the normal colour(8). This can cause problems for the bird as makes the feathers less strong and can result in members of the species not recognising it, though I think this individual will probably be OK on both counts. 

The other possibility is that this is a hybrid-goose, the result of a canada geese mating with a domestic goose or a different species. Geese breed with other species quite often and because all geese have 40 chromosomes they can do so successfully(9) which results in geese with unusual plumage. I would expect the hybrid to look more different from a canada goose than this individual does though.

1: 'Understand the British deer rut' 29/08/12 Discover Wildlife 
2: 'Roe Deer' The British Deer Society
3: RSPB: Curlew
4: 'Lymington and Keyhaven Marshes Local Nature Reserve' Hanstweb
5: 'Redshank' New Forest National Park Authority
6: RSPB: Turnstone
7: RSPB: Teal
8: 'Leucism and albinism' BTO
9: 'What is this strange goose?' Askanatrualist.com 

Brilliant Beaks

I'm a little behind on my blog posts after going away last weekend. Two weeks ago I visited RSPB Arne, the charity's reserve on the west side of Poole Harbour. As always I saw some great wildlife.

I was really pleased to spot a curlew from the hide.

Curlews are the largest British waders and are recognisable by their size and the curved beak. Curlews are in a lot of trouble at the moment. They used to breed in sizeable numbers in the New Forest but a 2016 survey recorded only 40 breeding pairs in the forest. It's estimated that across the South of England there are less than 200 breeding pairs and it's possible the bird will be extinct in the area within 20 years(1). 

This is obviously greatly concerning and is likely due to loss of habitat and nests being disturbed by people- curlews are ground-nesting birds. More needs to be done to protect this stunning birds before we lose them completely.

A more common wader I spotted at Arne was this group of redshank. 

Redshank are easily recognisable through their bright orange legs. A fair number do breed in the UK but there are some 130,000 birds wintering here(2). As many as half of these will have migrated here from Iceland. They feed on invertebrates in the mud which they probe with their short bill. 

I also spotted some more unusual birds which can be seen in this photo:

The black birds at the back here are cormorants and there's also what looks to be a less black-backed gull amongst them. It's the white birds at the forefront that are most interesting though and you can just make out from some of the bills, particularly the individual in the centre, that these are spoonbills.

Spoonbill spend most of their time inland at reedbeds, lakes and rivers but sometimes move to marine environments in the winter(3). They are migratory birds which have gradually been coming to Poole Harbour in greater numbers. This year there around 75 birds, a new record, due to the rising population in Europe(4). They were extinct in the UK but in the early 21st century a breeding colony was formed in Norfolk and this year a pair successfully bred in Yorkshire. The growing numbers of birds in Poole Harbour mean it is possible they may one day breed here.

One final bird for today is this Great Spotted Woodpecker which I saw yesterday. 

It's likely this woodpecker is on a dead branch looking for grubs. The way the bird's beak is attached to the skulls allows it to use great force on the branch and not give itself concussion(5). This is not the only way woodpeckers are adapted to reaching grubs- they have long tongues which can 40 millimetres beyond the tip of the beak!

1: Wynn, R. (2016) 'New Forest breeding Curlew survey: 2016 results'. Online here.

2: RSPB: Redshank

3: BirdLife International (2012) 'Platalea leucorodia' IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Version 2013.2

4: Birds of Poole Harbour: New Record Number of Spoonbill

5: BTO: Great Spotted Woodpecker