Tag Archive | fieldfare

Snow birds

In the two recent periods of snowy weather (The Beast from the East, over 1, 2 and 3 March) and the Mini Beast from the East (from 18 March onwards – no more snow falling but it is still heavy on the ground), we’ve been putting even more food down for the wild birds. We’ve been rewarded by some great views of birds we rarely see in the garden – and three species that are new to us.

The first new species might not seem that exciting, as they are all around us in the village, nesting in rookeries in the tall beech trees, but we have never had rooks (Corvus frugilegus) actually come down into our garden before.

Rook (Corvus frugilegus). Photo by Rafał Komorowski (Wikimedia Commons).

Rook (Corvus frugilegus). Photo by Axel Mauruszat (Wikimedia Commons).

The second new bird was a very exciting sighting, and he’s been back several times: a male hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes). This is the biggest finch in the UK, and we’ve never seen one before, anywhere, so to see one in our garden was wonderful. And he’s bloody massive. I tried to get a photo of him next to a chaffinch, the finch it most resembles, but sadly failed to get a decent shot.

Male hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes). Photo by Mikils (Wikimedia Commons).

Male hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes).

Top to bottom: Starling, blackbird, hawfinch.

The third new bird is a male reed bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus). This little bird looks superficially like a male house sparrow, but has a distinctive black head, bright white collar and a black streak like a tie down its chest. Its body plumage is a little streaky in appearance, reminiscent of a siskin’s or a dunnock’s.

Male reed bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus). Photo by Andreas Trepte (Wikimedia Commons).

We’ve also had quite a few fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) and redwing (Turdus iliacus) visit during the snowy periods. We only see these winter visitors occasionally.

Turdus overload: top to bottom Fieldfare, Song thrush, Redwing, Blackbird.

Bird species seen in our garden during the snowy spells of March 2018:

Blackbird (Turdus merula)

Song thrush (Turdus philomelos)

Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris)

Redwing (Turdus iliacus)

Robin (Erithacus rubecula)

Long-tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus)

Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)

Great tit (Parus major)

Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs)

Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

Greenfinch (Chloris chloris)

Hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes)

Siskin (Spinus spinus)

Reed bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus)

Dunnock (Hedge sparrow) (Prunella modularis)

House sparrow (Passer domesticus)

Starling (Sturnus vulgaris)

Pied wagtail (Motacilla alba yarrellii)

Wood pigeon (Columba palumbus)

Collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto)

Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula)

Rook (Corvus frugilegus)

Round and round the apple tree … redux

Nov29

Last night was very cold, and we woke to a heavy frost, the fiercest yet this winter. In the secret garden next door we were treated to the lovely sight of our first fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) of the winter, a new arrival from Scandinavia or points further east. He was flying between the tall beeches that surround the garden and the central, old apple tree, with its spread of windfall apples on the ground beneath, chasing off any blackbirds (Turdus merula) that got too close to his stash.

Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris). Photo by Bengt Nyman.

Now this might be a bit of a stretch, and I have no idea of the longevity of fieldfare, but I wonder if this is the same bird that stayed in the secret garden for well over a month during the winter two years ago. Fieldfare normally travel in flocks, so seeing a singleton is unusual enough. The fact that this one is displaying the same territorial behaviour towards the secret garden makes me wonder ….

The secret garden, surrounded by tall beech trees and with its old apple tree in the centre. The fieldfare was in one the beeches when I took this, not that you’ll be able to spot it.

Our visitor two years ago finally left us when our neighbours on the other side of the secret garden started having lots of treework done, involving noisy chainsaws. The day that started, he left. We didn’t see him last year. It’s lovely to have him (or one like him) back.

And as a double bonus, this morning I heard the first song thrush (Turdus philomelos) singing. They sing through the spring and early summer, and then stop, starting up again in winter. It’s wonderful to hear.

Update: 24 January 2017: We have had several days of very hard frosts and sub-zero temperatures at night. Two days ago our lone fieldfare was joined by four others, and the blackbirds were down feeding on the apples too. It seems the greater number meant that the original fieldfare gave up on chasing everyone else off. Yesterday we counted ten fieldfare. We have been supplementing the apples with oatmeal, suet, sultanas, sunflower seeds, chopped up dates and figs: I think the birds eat better than we do!

Update 27 January 2017: The apples are now gone, and so too are the fieldfare: we started putting out extra apples just too late to keep them around (they didn’t eat any of the other offerings). Oh well. It was lovely having our loner and latterly his friends for as long as we did.

A pterodactyl over my house

Feb5

Since Chap and I moved to our cottage 22 years ago, we have kept a nature diary. We record what’s going on in the garden, what wildlife we have seen, what the weather is doing, and general impressions of the natural world about us. We have a bird species list, where we note ‘new’ birds when we see them in or over our garden.

Yesterday morning I was chatting to Chap on the phone, looking out of the study window as I always do when I’m on the blower (my desk faces a wall so it’s nice to see the world …!), when I had a wonderful, chance surprise. A heron was flying towards our cottage, not very high at all and coming right at us. It is the first time I have ever seen a heron here (though there are some on the nearby streams and rivers and lakes). I squealed down the phone at Chap and near-deafened him, I think.

Grey heron (Ardea cinerea). Photo by Kclama.

It flew right over me and I had a great view of its belly as it passed. Beautiful.

Herons (Ardea cinerea) are such wonderful birds. We sometimes see them standing stock still in the local shallow chalk streams, poised and ready to strike, or walking with that slow, high-stepping tread through the water. They are a beautiful cloudy-sky grey. But it is when they are flying that they intrigue me most, and remind me of nothing more than the illustrations of flying pterodactyls in my dinosaur books from my childhood. Watching a heron fly you can quite easily believe that birds are feathery dinosaurs … Their heads are pulled back, their legs trail behind them and they beat their enormous wings with slow, steady flaps.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Paweł Kuźniar.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Mediamenta.

Their wingspan is among the largest of British birds, at between 155 and 195 cm for an adult bird.

(I know their proper title is Grey heron, but they are just ‘herons’ here as we don’t have any other type here in the UK—and they are, after all, the original bird to be called a heron).

Not a grey heron. Drawing by Matthew P. Martyniuk.

Not a heron. Drawing by Matthew P. Martyniuk.

Such an exciting day. But I think of all our heron sightings, the top one still has to be the day we saw a buzzard (Buteo buteo) and a heron having an aerial dogfight. We used to live in the Woodford Valley north of Salisbury, and were driving close to Lake House when we saw a tussle going on in the sky, just above the trees by the road. The two birds were circling round and round each other and occasionally clashing, and as they are both large birds it was quite a spectacle. We couldn’t quite make out what was going on, but we wondered if the buzzard was harrying the heron to make it regurgitate its catch.

PS. Our lone fieldfare is still with us, 36 days+ and counting. We had some snow the other day—not deep, but enough to remind him of home.

UPDATE Saturday 6 May 2017: This morning we had only our second ever sighting of a heron from our house in the near-twenty five years that we have lived here. And what a close encounter it was: it flew its slow flapping flight very low over our neighbours’ garden, and to our amazement landed in a very ungainly fashion on an overhead line just above the garden. It stayed perched there for about a minute or so before flying off. I hurried to look at our garden to see if it was heading for our pond, but sadly no – although I should be grateful that the tadpoles and newts and frogs live to see another day. Seeing such a massive bird perched on a wire was quite a thing.

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

Jan28

Every year since 1979, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has asked people across the UK to spend an hour recording the birds they see in their garden: the Big Garden Birdwatch. The results are used to provide a snapshot of the bird life in our country, and to work out which species are in trouble and in need of help. The census is billed as the world’s largest annual wildlife survey, and last year nearly half a million people took part (not bad in a country of 64 million people), counting 7,274,159 birds. This year’s event took place over the weekend of 24—25 January, and we spent an hour on Sunday morning doing our bit.

Chap and I take part every year, and I love the enforced stillness that an hour spent at the window watching and counting birds brings (Chap covers the front of the house and I look out of the back). An extended period of observation allows you to see things you might not otherwise have noticed, such as the several times I saw a blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) and a great tit (Parus major) flying, perching and then flying on together, very much a twosome;

Blue tit (left) and great tit (right). Photo by Tatiana Gerus.

or the male blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) feeding on the windfall apples—I have never seen this behaviour before (in fact, I have never seen a blackcap on the ground before), and always assumed they were insectivores rather than being fruit eaters as well. I saw two male blackcaps hanging around together, and wondered if they were perhaps part of a sibling or family group, or if simply male blackcaps aren’t very territorial (in contrast, the robins in our garden are forever chasing each other off), and later I saw a lone female. I hope they meet up and there’ll be lots of baby blackcaps this summer!

Male blackcap – well-named! Photo by Katie Fuller.

Female blackcap. Photo by Chris Romeiks (Vogelartinfo on Wikimedia Commons).

I was also really pleased to be able to add fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) to the list for the first time, as our Scandinavian guest is still with us. We first noticed him on 29 December last year, though he may well have been around before that, and since then he has been assiduously guarding the windfalls from his perch on the apple tree above them, or from one of the surrounding higher beech trees.

Fieldfare. Photo by Noel Reynolds.

Of the more unusual birds we see, no siskins (Spinus spinus) or bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) or bramblings (Fringilla montifringilla) this year, which was a shame.

Last year for the first time we were asked about other wildlife in our gardens too, so we were able to enter information about the frogs, badgers and hedgehogs that we have seen, as well as other animals.

RSPB website.

Round and round the apple tree

Dec29

By coincidence, my last couple of posts have been about Scandinavia, snow and ice, and ovicaprids. I’m not going to manage to shake free of all of those in this post either …

Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris). Photo by Arnstein Rønning.

We woke this morning to a terrific hard frost. The countryside is white; the trees are white; it is gorgeous. It’s not quite so gorgeous inside our bedroom, where there was ice on the inside of the windows—one of the joys of living in a 300 year old cottage with all its draughts and dampness and ill-fitting doors and windows.

We call one of the gardens next to ours ‘the secret garden’. Not so much because it is hidden, but because no-one uses it. The cottage to which it belongs is rented, and none of the tenants in the last few years has shown any interest in it. Contract gardeners come and cut the grass about four times a year, and that’s it. We can see into the garden from our bedroom dormer window. There is an alder tree which has grown from a small sapling when we arrived in 1992 to a large, two-trunked tree; there is an old ruined cottage or barn or outbuilding, the stone walls of which survive to about a metre or so high and are gradually being covered by brambles; and there is a venerable old apple tree. The apple tree always fruits prodigiously, and because no-one uses the garden, the apples stay where they fall. They provide welcome food for wildlife in the winter months.

This morning the apples were providing a frosty feast for about nine or ten blackbirds (Turdus merula), a grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), and a single fieldfare (Turdus pilaris). Fieldfare are a palaearctic species, living in more northerly latitudes in the summer and heading south in the winter—our fieldfare come from Scandinavia. Normally they travel in flocks, so it is always surprising to see a lone one. This one was vigorously defending its food, spending more time chasing all the blackbirds away than it was eating. Watching them, I could almost hear the Benny Hill Show theme tune in my head as the fieldfare scooted round and round the apple tree in hot pursuit of a blackbird.

Play nicely, children. Photo by Dave Jackson.

Play nicely, children. (This is a small fieldfare as an adult fieldfare is quite a bit larger than an adult blackbird). Photo by Dave Jackson.

I would love to have seen this many!

Update 4 January 2015: A week on and the fieldfare is still with us. He sits in one of the higher beech trees that surrounds the secret garden, and swoops down to chase off larger interlopers who are getting too close to his precious stash of slowly-rotting apples. He tolerates the smaller birds such as chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs) and dunnocks (Prunella modularis) and blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), but is aggressive in his pursuit of the blackbirds. Even larger birds like jackdaws (Corvus monedula) get the ‘get orf moi laaaand’ treatment from him (or should that be written in a Scandinavian rather than a West Country accent?)

Update 29 November 2016: The fieldfare stayed for about a month, leaving the day our neighbours on the other side of the secret garden started having some very noisy chainsaw work done on their trees. We didn’t see him in winter 2015, but this morning we woke to a hard frost and a lone fieldfare guarding the apple tree in the secret garden. Is it the same bird? I’d like to think so ….

Inglenookery

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