Bird Watching magazine May 2012 by Bird Watching

NEW SWAROVSKI EL 32 FIRST TEST!

MAY 2012

BEST BIRD GARDEN

We reveal the winning garden Britain’s best-selling bird magazine

WHAT TO DO IF YOU FIND A BABY BIRD

Complete guide on how to deal with fledglings this spring

NEW ID SECTION

Ringed Plovers made easy

ALL ABOARD

The best boat trips for seabird watching

TIME FOR A CHAT How to see Redstart, Robin, Wheatear, Nightingale, Whinchat and Stonechat

May 2012 £4.10

GO BIRDING RARITY ROUND-UP SPECIAL OFFER 10 brilliant sites to see spring migrants – from Avon to Argyll

All the news from bird guru Lee Evans – including Short-toed Treecreeper

Join the Bird Watching team on an wildlife watching holiday in the Highlands

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Golden Oriole, Dartford Warbler, photo skills, Nightingale, Collared Flycatcher, The Urban Birder, Secretarybird, book reviews and more

Your birding

Longest migrations

month When, where and how to see more birds

jargon buster

Sooty Shearwater 40,000 miles

(New Zealand, North America, South America, Antarctica, Africa)

Arctic Tern 22,000 miles

Ageing

(North America, Europe, Africa, South America,Antarctica)

Wheatear 18,600 miles (North America, Europe, Africa)

Pectoral Sandpiper 18,000 miles (Asia, North America, South America, Australia)

Short-tailed Shearwater 10,500 miles (North America, Asia, Australia)

fieldcraft Alan Williams

Don’t neglect wetlands Spring song is at the maximum this month and the dawn chorus irresistible. However, though it is tempting to be lured out to enjoy the warbles and ramblings of our summer migrants and resident woodland songbirds doing what they do best, spare a bit of May time for wetlands. The beginning of May sees some of the most exciting passage of arctic breeding waders, scarce terns and Little Gulls, plus the chance of something truly rare. Get up early and check out a gravel pit, muddy edged waterbody or flooded field near you and keep hoping. You could find a Wood Sandpiper, Temminck’s Stint or Spoonbill, or even a Glossy Ibis or Purple Heron or something even rarer, now that the mad month of May is under way.

Birders use a lot of terms for the age of birds, but what do they mean? A juvenile bird is one hatched that year and fledged from the nest but which has not yet undergone its first moult. After the first body moult in the late summer or autumn, the bird reaches the first-winter stage. In the northern hemisphere, the first winter continues into the second calendar year, and in the spring the next transition is to first-summer (effectively adult in many small birds). In larger birds such as gulls and Gannets, subsequent moults lead to second-, third-, fourth- winter and summer plumages, until mature adult plumage is reached.

birding top ten Movies 2 1 Dove Actually 2 Inglourious Bustards 3 Full Metal Jackdaw 4 Easy Eider 5 The Little Brown Italian Job 6 Four Wigeons and a Fulmaral 7 Raiders of the Lost Auk 8 Mary Puffins 9 Saving Private Wryneck 10 Lark, Stork and Two Smoking Barn Owls

No hide? No tripod? No problem Birds are often spooked easily by the human form and less so by cars. So, for photography, a car can make an excellent mobile hide. To give

6 Bird Watching 2012

added stability to your camera, you should rest it; but tripods are impractical in cars and the window ledge unforgiving. An excellent

alternative is a bean bag. You can make one yourself with a sack or cloth bag or even a sock filled with rice or pulses.

Thanks to everyone who took part. Next issue, we’re after birding bands, part 2. See previous winners at birdwatching. co.uk/topten and send your entries to birdwatching@ bauermedia.co.uk

Your birding

month

4 for the list

Greenshanks are noisy, lanky relatives of the Redshank. They pass through on their way north (they are largely arctic breeders)

Martin Creaser (Alamy)

Danny Green (NHPA)

Greenshank

Dotterel

this month, and pop in to feed at inland pits. Listen for the ringing ‘tew tew tew’ call, often the first sign that Greenshanks are around.

Groups of Dotterel are called ‘trips’. May is a good month to look for trips passing through on their way to their mountain-top nesting sites.

Finely ploughed agricultural fields, often with new growth of peas, are often favoured, where they may stop and feed for a day or more. F1online digitale Bildagentur GmbH (Alamy)

Richard WInn (Alamy)

Watch roding Woodcock in action at birdwatching. co.uk/videos

Roding Woodcock

One of the great experiences of early summer is a walk around a damp wood with extensive open areas, looking for Woodcock doing

their dusk ‘roding’ display flight. They patrol just above tree height, alternating high-pitched ‘wizzik’ calls with soft bass croaking.

Temminck’s Stint

One of the prizes of early May for wader finders is the tiny Temminck’s Stint. They are scarce passage waders which creep along

the edge of gravel pits or the short-cropped vegetation near the water’s edge, looking like a tiny Common Sandpiper. birdwatching.co.uk 7

chats

The chats include some of our most charismatic and colourful small birds. Mike Weedon looks at why it is...

Time for a chaT a

chat is to all intents and purposes a smaller thrush, or if you like a smaller member of the family Turdidae, often placed in the thrush subfamily Turdinae. The distinction between chats and thrushes is not strictly based on size, though, so the mini-sized American Catharus thrushes are real thrushes, while some of the larger robins are still chats. For our purposes, though, the chats are a loose collection of small, thrush-like, robin-like, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face it chat-like birds, closely related to the thrushes. In the UK we have seven main species: Wheatear, Redstart, Black Redstart, Stonechat, Whinchat, Nightingale and Robin. All have striking coloration with the exception of the skulking Nightingale (though, this bird has a

rich chestnut tail to brag about, and a vocal mastery to compensate) and one or two are among our most attractive small birds. That said, with the exception of the Robin and Nightingale, there is sexual dimorphism in plumage and the females tend to be a good deal duller, in some cases bordering on â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;little brown jobâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; status. At this time of year all are present and correct, the Wheatear, Whinchat, Redstarts and Nightingale being essentially summer migrants, here for the breeding season, before heading south in the autumn. So, now is a good time to go looking for them (and listening for them), and a good time to take a step back and take a look at this interesting group of delightful birds.

It is perhaps somewhat surprising for anyone living in the south-east that the breeding population of the Whinchat is somewhere between 14,000 and 28,000 pairs. They are essentially a breeding bird of the north and west (with a more or less isolated population in East Anglia), favouring gorse-rich uplands and heaths, and in the rest of the country are largely seen as passage birds, in sufficiently small numbers to make them one of the prizes of the early May migration period. Along with the Stonechat, this little Saxicola is the only serious rival the Redstart has in the chat beauty contest. A spring male Whinchat, perched high and prominent, is one of our most pleasingly coloured of all birds, king of all it surveys, with a peachy orange throat and

24 Bird Watching 2012

breast, contrasting with a white belly, bold white supercilium and submoustachial stripe, flanking dark cheeks, plus streaked brown upperparts. Like the Redstart, the bright colours are masked in the fresh autumn colours, when the males look more like the females. So, now is the time to seek them out. Sadly, finding Whinchats is not as easy as it was even 15 or so years ago, with their population reducing by more than half between 1995 and 2008. In common with the Stonechat, some taxonomists (after analysis of genetic evidence) consider the Whinchat (and other Saxicola species, of course) to not be true chats (ie in the sense of smaller thrushes), but really flycatchers.

Markus Varesvuo (Nature Picture Library)

Whinchat

chats

birdwatching.co.uk 25

SpecieS focuS

stIll tIme to go for gold Our most colourful spring songster might not be around for much longer, warns Steve Wiltshire. But what can we do to ensure their future? failed to see a Golden Oriole the first time I went looking, but I did hear one sing, and I was hooked. Those fluted notes, emanating from deep within the woodland, had an exotic quality, despite it being a grey, chilly evening in Suffolk. Male orioles, with their buttercup-yellow and jet-black plumage, are rare among British birds in having a fantastic song AND being highly colourful. After a few more visits, I began to see the occasional flash of yellow, as birds chased each other through the trees. It took a long time before I saw one well, though, helped ultimately by the fact that I was fortunate enough to end up working on the RSPB’s Lakenheath Fen reserve. The thinking was that if I wanted to see an oriole well, working here was probably a good start. One encounter sticks in my mind. I was tucked into a Hawthorn bush because an oriole was singing nearby. It flew, landing right in front of me on a long, bare branch, perching at the end like a Spotted Flycatcher, the thin branch bouncing under the bird’s weight. It stayed there for 10 minutes, preening occasionally. I could see the dark-red bill and the isolated spot of yellow on the primary coverts without binoculars – still the best view I’ve ever had. Even after five summers of oriole watching, they still have an effect on me. Last year, after a few seconds of enjoying binocular-filling views of my first oriole of the spring, I became aware of my heart pounding in my chest at double speed. Few birds that I have seen as often can still do that to me. In recent years, the sounds of the spring dawn chorus on this fen have been magical. Hundreds of reedbed warblers chuntering away, a Bittern booming, a distant volley of bugling from

I could see the dark-red bill and the isolated spot of yellow on the primary coverts without binoculars – still the best view I’ve ever had.” 50 Bird Watching 2012

hidden Cranes, and then oriole song; sometimes a double note, occasionally a more complicated phrase. In contrast to the beautiful, deep whistled song of the male, both sexes produce a Jay-like screech or ‘cat-call’ (if you’ve ever accidentally stepped on a moggy – that noise). They also make an alarm-call which I’ve only heard twice. Once a Sparrowhawk flew directly over the nest tree, the male oriole shot vertically from the canopy uttering a falcon-like ‘ki-ki-kiki-ki’ as it mobbed the raptor. More experienced oriole watchers than I have also heard the female produce a quiet, soft version of the male’s song. But for me, most memorably of all, for a few evenings a couple of years ago, oriole and Nightingale sang together from the same wood. Breeding hasn’t been proven at Lakenheath for the last two years, so how long will orioles continue to be part of this wonderful Fenland soundscape? In the 1960s, wandering birds from a then thriving Dutch population – nesting among hybrid Black Poplars in the Polders – encountered similar cultivars in the Fens. Orioles first bred in the poplar plantations near Lakenheath in 1966; they reached a maximum of 14 singing males in 1971 and birds began moving into smaller plantations and shelter belts. At their peak there were 40 singing males in the Fenland basin – heady days indeed! But the Lakenheath poplar plantations – being a commercial venture – were felled over time. The Golden Oriole Group, RSPB and Suffolk Wildlife Trust rallied to ensure some poplars were left standing. Since the 1990s, two to three pairs have nested in the spared trees and areas of new trees have been established. I have planted young poplars over the last few winters, more in hope than expectation that one day an oriole would sing from their branches. Other poplars that orioles occupied in the Fens remain, but the orioles have gone. With the loss of the large plantation – the ‘engine room’ – the satellite populations disappeared. There wasn’t a gradual decline, either – birds present at sites in previous years didn’t dwindle over the coming summers, they just disappeared. Trends in other northern European populations have shown similar declines. The Dutch population has dropped from 10,000 pairs in the early 1980s to as few as 2,000 pairs last year. The poplars in the Dutch Polders are now being replaced with a mix of other species, seemingly having a detrimental effect. Similar dramatic declines are apparent in the Danish and Finnish populations, but here no real loss or change in habitat has occurred. Ultimately, it seems the trend here and elsewhere nearby was always going to be down – habitat loss appears to be only part of the story.

One suggestion is that something untoward is happening on migration, or more likely, wherever this northern European population is wintering (probably the Congo). Recent research from the BTO has suggested that habitat specialists – like Nightingales and others – are unable to cope with rapid environmental change in their wintering areas. This is compounded by similar issues back on their breeding grounds. Also, species are not advancing their return migration dates to correspond with Britain’s earlier springs, so resident birds are stealing a march on migrants. Key invertebrate prey is emerging earlier and is no longer synchronized with orioles’ arrival and breeding cycle. The prediction that global warming would be favourable for all ‘Mediterranean’ species on the edge of their range in Britain, appears in the short-term to be wrong, or at least too simplistic. We have only had regular breeding orioles in

SpecieS focuS

Britain for 45 years. The last few decades are really just a blip in terms of the historical distribution. Things can move pretty fast, though, in terms of bird distributions (see Cetti’s Warbler), and oriole populations in much of the rest of Europe are doing well. Surprisingly, they are among the top 10 increasing species in Europe, so perhaps this isn’t the end of the story. So what can be done? No conservation organisation is going to buy land to plant a large area of non-native trees, which are short-lived, require a lot of management and are of limited value to other species, all for a bird whose global population is measured in the tens of millions. But that’s not to say we should give up. Fenland orioles are often back on territory by the last few days of April, but birds occurring in late May/early June on the south coast are overshooting birds from Iberia. Perhaps, these are potential colonists. Orioles have nested

previously in southern England in Sweet Chestnut and other trees, suggesting a different origin from that of the Fenland birds (orioles from elsewhere are more catholic in their choice of nesting tree). The habitat needs to be in place, in the right areas, ready for wandering orioles. More woodland within our wetland reserves would be beneficial for a range of other declining species, and potentially orioles, too. Alder and willow are great for Willow Tits and Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers; if you stick a belt of Poplars in as well, so much the better. Lots of willow within a reedbed is the stuff of nightmares for most reserve managers, but wetlands that have a well-managed mix of tree species in suitable areas, must be a good thing. Orioles have an association with trees next to water, and this type of open, wet woodland would benefit declining species we already have, plus who knows what else we might get? In the

Martin Creaser (Alamy)

golden oriole is perhaps Britain’s brightest bird – but is its future in the UK just as bright?

Netherlands, Bluethroat numbers are going through the roof, resulting in summering birds here, and Common Rosefinch anyone? After a century of decline Red-backed Shrike was finally lost as a British breeding species in 1989 but, in the last few years, birds have again bred on Dartmoor. Whether this represents recolonisation or opportunistic breeding by a few random birds remains to be seen, but it goes to show that there is always hope. When I saw that first oriole of the spring, I felt relief. But that sparkling May morning was bittersweet; would this be their last year, the final song from the Fenland orioles? I really hope not. RSPB Lakenheath Fen is a popular reserve, because there are some fantastic birds to be seen, and it’s the last place in the country where orioles regularly occur. If any return this year, enjoy them – even if you only hear them. You may not get many more chances – for a while. birdwatching.co.uk 51

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