Tag Archives: bird ringing

Birds, Ecology, Hill Farming, Uncategorized

Faux Christmas?

A friend of mine has just returned to the UK having lived for several years on the other side of the globe. She explains her disorientation in time and space on the disruption to her seasons (I have no excuse!). It’s mid-summer here and mid-winter in New Zealand, where those who suffer from European nostalgia have a pretend Christmas.

Here on our smallholding in Mid-Wales we do something similar — opening our gifts on one particular day. It’s exciting. It’s bird-ringing day! Not their necks so that we can roast them with pigs-in-blankets and plum pudding, but counting all the year’s baby birds, catching the fledgelings that are about to leave their nests and, in particular, those in our nest boxes and ringing them. A right of passage — a birdy Bar Mitzvah — we should have a party!

At a time when we feel we will be overwhelmed by the sheer fecundity of our temperate rain forest, it is good to have some positive feedback for our efforts for wildlife. We are engulfed in 8 foot bracken and torn at by wildly flailing tentacles of bramble that reach out across the tracks to grab us as the mower clogs and stalls yet again, which is just as well as it is overheating.

The cloud of buzzing flies that pursue us fails to reassure us that our local biosphere is healthy or that forswearing insecticides was a good idea. But counting birds does.

Jon and Jan

The stalwarts from the Habitat Protection group have made their annual visits and this year has been very good for blue tits — 52 chicks from 5 nest boxes. How’s’at for productivity! It represents a lot of caterpillars! Lots of work from this top-of -the-table, enterprising species.

A better year for our “target” species, the more endangered pied flycatcher. They produced 24 chicks from their 5 nests. Up 20% but one of their nests failed completely last year — we suspected a great spotted woodpecker. It’s harder for pied flycatchers as they are migrants and have to co-ordinate their arrival with the weather and the caterpillars, not to mention competing with the locals for nesting sites and finding each other again as the males arrive first.

Pied Flycatcher

There was only one nest of great tits but they produced 7 chicks.

Great tit fledgeling

Three of our 14 boxes were empty; today I noticed a great spotted woodpecker squarking a warning to its own fledgelings — wildlife is a balance.

They also ringed a treecreeper fledgling hopping about and keen to be included. They tend to nest in the holes between the roots of the oak trees and in the deep splits in trunks, we watched one earlier this year taking lots of spiders to a nest on the hill.

So, inspired by all this avian fertility, we bash on with re-establishing the tracks to maintain some sort of access to our wild areas and woodland and uncover the diversity that is appearing and a weighty crop of rowan berries and wild cherries that are already keeping the blackbirds and thrushes busy.

This is the time of the year when we regularly lose our well and it is quite important that we find it in its nest of horsetail ferns and overgrown by all this burgeoning diversity. Here it is and it’s full.

Standard
Birds, Ecology

Crisis in Paradise!

This is not how a bird box for our precious pied flycatchers should look — it has a perfectly good metal reinforced entrance hole facing the front. This box has been illegally modified — but by whom?

Number one suspect! Greater spotted woodpecker. But amazingly when checked by the intrepid bird ringers, it still contained 5 warm eggs.

The cunning woodpecker will be back to raid this nest once the chicks have hatched — no time to waste!

Last week Bill chastised me for cluttering up the new garage with a sheet of aluminium rescued from the back of a discarded electric fire — it was just what we needed and after an hour of wrestling with a blunt hacksaw and only minor injuries we had a patch. At first light we advanced upon the box, silicon gun in hand, 12 foot ladder under arm. As I wobbled up the ladder a female pied flycatcher whizzed out through the hole in the side of the box. I lobbed my silicone-sticky armour-plating over the hole and withdrew. Mother bird was mystified!

Then ensued the horrible second thoughts that occur when one interferes with Nature — visions of abandoned eggs, of feathers stuck to silicon, of a gormless bird permanently baffled by the loss of her new improved access, etc.

5 days later the ringers returned — she was sitting on chicks — we did not disturb her.

Standard
Birds

Jubilee Ringing

Today 4 septuagenarians, one carrying a 10 ft ladder, picked their way along a precipitate and thickly wooded hillside in the foothills of the Cambrian mountains. While others waved flags (today was the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee) we looked for bird nest boxes put up at the end of winter and now hidden in the deep foliage of the Welsh rainforest. Bill and I were trying to help ring this year’s chicks.

Great tit, one of a brood of 8. Very feisty and ready to fly the nest.

A right of passage — to get a number before they leave the nest — for us to monitor what is going on and to make sure we are doing the best we can to help the local birdlife! Most of out boxes only went up this year so expectations were not high as Jan and Jon of the local Habitat Protection Group inspected the 12 boxes which were designed primarily to boost our population of pied flycatchers.

This box had 7 chicks in it — Pied flycatchers!

Two of the boxes revealed pied flycatchers, one with a record brood of 9 chicks. The total of 16 chicks in the first year exceeded our wildest dreams.

Undignified but gently done this great tit gets registered and tagged with a little metal anklet.
Pied flycatcher chick poses after being ringed.

12 boxes yielded 48 chicks of which 24 were blue tits, 16 pied flycatchers and 8 great tits.

Thanks to the Habitat Protection Group for sharing their time, knowledge, expertise and for their patience and for giving us such a memorable jubilee.

Standard