Category: Birds

Bird Count

THE BIRDS looked so miserable in the non-stop rain yesterday that we decided to postpone doing the RSPB garden bird survey until today. A shame; if we’d stuck to the hour that we’d originally planned we’d have been able to include a young Grey Heron that flew down to the raised bed behind the pond, then flew off again when I opened the studio window to shoo it off, as I don’t want it to eat our frogs and Smooth Newts.

We also missed out on the Nuthatch which has been a regular visitor but the survey is supposed to be a snapshot of what turned up during a particular hour and, as you can see from my sketches (above), we saw most of our regulars, for instance the Blue Tits, which are looking dull and bedraggled after all the work they’ve put in feeding their young recently. We didn’t see the fledglings leave the nestbox, as this usually happens early in the morning, but we noticed that the parents were coming to the feeders then heading straight back to the wood, so presumably they’ve taken the youngsters there.

Also putting in appearance during the hour, as you can see from my sketches, were Great Tit, Wood Pigeon, Chaffinch, Bullfinch, Dunnock and Greenfinch.

Grey Feather

I PICKED UP this feather by the stream in Coxley Valley. The most obvious bird to leave a 6 inch (16cm) wing feather (a secondary?) like this in the wood would be a Pheasant but this feather is greyish brown and whitish, rather than the brown and tan that I’d expect a feather from a female Pheasant to be. If I’d picked it up on the coast I would have assumed it was from a juvenile gull, and of course it could be; they do fly over the wood.

Another thought was that it might be a Tawny Owl. We do get them in the wood but there’s no sign of a downy fringe to this feather, even under a microscope at 60x. It’s this downy fringe to the feathers that makes owls so silent in flight, compared, for instance, with the clattery take off of a Wood Pigeon.

It’s just occurred to me, looking out of the window that the pylon wires cross the valley at that point. Any bird sitting on the top wire – or for that matter in a tree-top below – could have dropped this while preening and one bird that will occasionally sit and preen on a perch overlooking the wood is a Sparrowhawk. The colour and pattern would be about right for a large female.

The adult female is dull brown on the upper wing, barred on the lower wing, so if you imagine this as a right wing feather the right (plain) side of the feather would show on the upper wing while the barred (left) side would be overlapped by the adjacent feather of the upper wing, so the barring would be visible only from below.

May Blossom

THE FIRST Hawthorn in blossom is a bush overhanging the railway cutting at the foot of Addingford Steps. It gets the warmth from the south-facing brick embankment below.

The hawthorn blossom has a sweet smell, I wouldn’t call it a ‘heady’ smell; it’s not an over-the-top sweetness nor is it sugary sweet like sherbet it’s just, um, sweetish.

Each flower has five petals, which is not surprising because Hawthorn is a member of the rose family, Rosaceae. There’s one female pistil in the middle surrounded by a number of male stamens, each with a reddish tip. When you see the haws, the hawthorn berries, later in the year, the petals and stamens have withered away but you can still see the remnant of the pistil at the end of the berry.

Botanically the haw is a true berry, even though it might seem too pulpy and woody to qualify as what we’d expect if we bought a ‘mixed berries’ yogurt. From a botanical perspective raspberries and blackberries aren’t berries, they’re collections of drupes; fleshy, thin-skinned fruits containing the seed in a stone. Smaller versions of single drupe fruits such as the cherry, plum and olive.

Ra-cha-cha-chat

What bird sings from a bush by the canal, opposite a flooded marshy field known as the Strands, in what I’ve described in my field notes as an ‘agitated chattering, rasping, stoccato, occasional morse code phrases’?

Like smells, bird song is difficult to describe in words!

Sunday was International Dawn Chorus day. At this time of year you get the full variety of the dawn chorus as the summer migrants have joined our resident birds. I’m no expert on bird song but at least having got out a bit this spring I’m familiar enough with our residents to spot a new and noticeably different song.

 Crab Apple blossom at the Strands last week

This song is one that I’ve heard down by this marshy field before and I know that it’s either Reed or Sedge Warbler. I always forget which one by the time it appears next year. I didn’t manage to focus my binoculars on it but thought that I glimpsed it singing inconspicuously from halfway up in the bush.

The RSPB website (see link below) describes the song of the Sedge Warbler as ‘a noisy, rambling warble compared to the more rhythmic song of the reed warbler’. Reed Warblers are, anyway, as the name suggests, more typical of areas with large reedbeds. You’ll find Sedge Warblers in reedbeds too but also at damp wetlands like the Strands, where you’re less likely to find the Reed Warbler.

Link; The Sedge Warbler page on the RSPB website helpfully includes a recording of the song.

Nightjar

10.30 a.m., Langsett Reservoir, lakeside path through conifer plantation.

THE TWO things that struck me about this bird were:

  1. How grey it was.
  2. That it appeared somehow hunched, almost as if it hadn’t got a head.

As I wrote in my notes, it was ‘grey and blockily streaky, like the bark of a pine tree’. It reminded us in size and proportion of a woodpecker. Barbara has a distinct impression of it having a ‘chopped off’ tail.

We’d seen two hikers walking along the fence bordering the cleared area at the other side of the reservoir and I suspect that this bird had been flushed by them and perched on the banking on the northern shore until we came along and it flew up to the cover of the treetops.

The first thing that the Collins Bird Guide says about the Nightjar, highlighted in italics as a diagnostic feature, is that it is ‘mottled brown, buff-white, grey and black‘ which to me equates well with my strong impression of it being ‘blockily streaky, like the bark of a pine tree’. The ‘headless’ look is also a characteristic of nightjars, which have large heads and inconspicuous beaks. As the Guide says, they’re ‘hard to detect’ when ‘resting lenghtwise on a branch’. So a bird noted for its close resemblance to pine bark.

The area on the far side of the reservoir has been cleared and is being managed in order to encourage birds of heathy, open clearings like the Nightjar and Redstart. Nightjars are summer migrants, arriving in May. Hope this one – if that’s what it was – settles and breeds.

Other possibilities from such a brief sighting are Wryneck – highly unlikely – and Little Owl  which is more of a possibility but it’s a bird that we’ve seen occasionally before and are fairly familiar with. It’s brownish rather than greyish and, even at a brief sighting ‘owlish’. The Little Owl has a ‘chopped off’ tail, but it has a distinctly rounded head.

We saw if fly for no more than 50 yards up the slope, but saw no trace of the undulating flight that is typical of woodpeckers or the ‘bounding’ flight of the Little Owl. It was silent in flight, as you’d expect from owls and nightjars.

Sandpiper

No doubts however about the Common Sandpiper which we got an unusually close-up view of, looking down on it at the water’s edge from the road that goes along the dam wall.

Wing over Corfu

The heron appeared larger and proportionally longer in the wing than ours but, when I look it up in the book the Purple Heron is actually a bit smaller than our Grey. As we waited in the departure lounge we looked out towards Mount Pantokrator, the highest mountain in Corfu. We’ll have to return to explore further.

The runway goes out along the edge of an inlet, straight towards Mouse Island. It cuts off a lagoon which was the ancient port of the town. A large bird, which I’m able to confirm from my quick sketch was a White Stork, flies down to the scrub at the edge of the runway but we’re called to board the plane before we can get out our binoculars and focus on it.

Our plane heads not out over Mouse Island but over the town, giving us an amazing view of the fortress and old town and then the green and hilly north of the Island as we head north west along the Adriatic Coast of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia.

Spectacled Warbler

WITH SUCH a brief glimpse, this bird, which was checking out the leaves and the trunk of an olive tree, might have been an Olivaceous Warbler or an Olive Tree Warbler – two fairly indistinct birds. But I noticed a darker head and whitish breast and Barbara got an impression of an eye-ring and of chestnut on the wings, I’m going for Spectacled Warbler, Sylvia conspicullata, especially since neither of us noticed any eye-stripe.

Female Spectacled Warblers are less distinctive than males. It appeared to be chattering to itself.

Cleopatra

Cleopatra, Gonepteryx cleopatra, with a fluttery flight, touching down briefly on the geraniums in my sketch, was the most conspicuous butterfly of our holiday. It’s pastel yellow and larger that our Large ‘Cabbage’ White.

We got a better view (top) of what I’m now convinced is a male Spectacled Warbler. It was a softly chattering little trill and what looked like a small white pennant that attracted my attention to it on the top of a telephone pole. It then flew to the top of an olive.

It was greyer brown than I’d shown the bird this morning, with a markedly darker head. It’s silhouette was more ‘perky’ – tail up, larger head – than your average warbler.

And – the clinching detail – this time I could see a small white ring around its eye.

Woodchat Shrike

THE CONES of this cypress have 12 scales. On this fallen fragment the dark green scaly leaflets have dried to ochre brown. In colour, shape and texture these plates, and the tiny scales that cover the leaf stems when seen through a hand lens, remind me of the armour of an armadillo.

10.34 a.m.; the Woodchat Shrike is a summer visitor to Corfu. At 18 cm, it’s almost Song Thrush size.

This bird (right) looked very much like a buzzard but birds of prey are so difficult to identify, especially when circling against a bright sky. We saw two later and heard a buzzard-like peevish ‘mewing’ call.

As I drew this flower at the car parking area at our apartments I didn’t realise that it was a buttercup; the petals are more pointed than those of our British buttercups but I should have guessed as its mace-like seed-heads remind me of the largest of our native buttercups, Kingcups.

The nearest that I can find in the book is Jersey Buttercup, Ranunculus paludosus, which fits in almost every detail, except that I wouldn’t have described it as a ‘hairy perennial’.

I tried pencil when I started drawing the buttercup but soon resorted to the precision of a 01 sized nibbed Pilot Drawing Pen. I didn’t bring my favourite ArtPen with me because, as a fountain pen, it has a tendency to go blotty after being taken on a plane because of the pressure difference. A selection of Pilot Drawing Pens will be fine for the all too short time that we’re here.

11.40 a.m.; Soft quizzical two note call of a Jay. If flies down to a shady spot then up to the branch of an olive. It eats whatever it picked up – an olive or a snail? – then wipes its bill on the branch.

Temp. 29°C, 50% cumulus

Despite the name, Woolly Trefoil, Trifolium tomentosum, is hairless but as the flowerhead grows it becomes more rounded and woolly. These plants at the car parking area were up to 20 cm (8 inches) tall with flowerheads spreading to 1 cm. It is the dominant plant on areas where limestone chippings have been spread.

I draw these spiral seed-pods alongside my sketch of trefoil flowers later, thinking that they belong to it, but they’re actually those of the appropriately named Large Disk Medick, Medicago orbicularis. It grows alongside the trefoil by a path through the olives.

12.50 p.m.; A small, hovering bee-fly, 8 mm long with a straight tongue almost as long again, like a tiny flying kiwi, visits red and white clovers.

1.40 p.m., Benitses Taverna; A large black bumble-bee with blue on it’s rear end has a different, more direct flight to our bumbling varieties. It’s a Carpenter Bee, perhaps Xylocopa violacea.

The Canary Island Date Palm, Phoenix canariensis, introduced and planted widely around the Mediterranean, has inedible fruits.

I’m trying to get in holiday mood, so I feel that I should be trying media that I wouldn’t normally use for my regular work so I did try starting to draw the palm with an Artline ErgoLine Calligraphy Pen with a 2 millimetre nib, a pen that my illustrator friend John Welding is experimenting with at the moment. He gave me this one to try out but the unfamiliar feel made it seem a bit awkward for me, so again, as with the pencil, I went back to my everyday media.

Some day I will experiment! But I’m only here for a week and there is so much to draw so I need to get on with it in reassuringly familiar pen and watercolour wash. At least I drew the palm in pencil rather than ink!

Not so easy to identify when you see it in the water when its legs are hidden, this gull closely resembles our Herring Gull but, as we would have seen immediately if it had been standing on the rocks by the harbour, it’s actually a Yellow-legged Gull, a familiar species in the Mediterranean.

The Beech Marten, Martes foina, was, as many of them unfortunately are, a roadside casualty. It was about the size of a slim, small cat.

This Whinchat was perching on a wire by the substantial ruins of the Roman baths on the slope behind the sea-front properties at Benitses.

Grey Monday

IT’S A SHAME that after all the settled dry weather that we’ve had that the Easter bank holiday has turned out so grey but it’s a good opportunity for us to head to town for some shopping we had to do. I painted this terrace of houses from a table in MacDonald’s while Barbara waited in the queue for our veggie burger wraps. MacDonald’s don’t take so very long to serve you; by launching straight into watercolour without any preparatory drawing I got this far in 5 or 10 minutes.

I replenished the bird feeders at lunchtime. Starlings soon came to the mealworm/fat block but the Great Spotted Woodpecker doesn’t seem to like it when its just been put out. It flew in as if it wanted to land then thought better of it and went off to explore the trunk and branches of the crab apple. Perhaps because the block is too slippy for it. It clings to the plastic stem once the Starlings have nibbled down the block a bit.

A surprise visitor was a Nuthatch coming for sunflower hearts an overly cute ‘Little House on the Prairie’ style feeder which our goddaughter Helen bought for us. If it keeps attracting the Nuthatch, I’m prepared to tolerate a little bit of cuteness in our garden.

Pidglings

THERE’S BEEN a strange looking pigeon around, one that looks as if it’s been sprayed with a coat of grey undercoat. It’s been pecking around below the bird table where it was joined by an adult Wood Pigeon. As the mystery pigeon then started flapping its wings in the ‘feed me! feed me!’ mime adopted by most fledglings, it was obvious that the two were related. This evening the adult was accompanied by two plain grey youngsters.

They’ve taken to the sunflower hearts so adult will now be able to introduce them to the greens available; yesterday three adults Wood Pigeons were nibbling the leaves of our purple-sprouting broccoli. We’ve been using the broccoli flower-stems in stir-fry. The Wood Pigeons know a good thing when they taste it, although they seem to be intent on nibbling the leaves to shreds, but probably the flowers are equally acceptable.

The Dolphin Paint Shop

The finished model should have had a tessellated texture. I'm not sure what happened to that, or why my altitude specific 'go-faster' stripe has turned out to be green, black and white.

My attempt at the Create 3D like a Superhero! metablob tutorial has reached the virtual paint shop. It hasn’t quite turned out like author Chipp Walters’ Dolphin underwater recon vehicle, partly, I think, because my version of Vue Pioneer isn’t quite the same as the one referred to in the book but it’s been interesting going through the process and discovering where certain functions of the program are stowed away.

Links; Chipp Walters’ blog

Cornucopia 3D where you can currently download the latest version of Vue Pioneer for free.

Ash Landing

SOMEONE had found this mammal skull and left it on one of the display boards at Ash Landing National Trust reserve, providing an impromptu quiz. What was it?

Even though the long canines at the front are missing, it’s obvious that this isn’t a rabbit or hare, it’s too large and long anyway, and to me it isn’t as broad and powerful as I’d expect for a badger so I’m going to guess at Red Fox.

And the answer is . . .

Yes, according to Mammals of Britain, Their Tracks, Trails and Signs (Lawrence and Brown, 1967), that’s what it is.

I’ve added their labels to my photograph. Alveoli are small cavities or pits, and here in an anatomical sense, that means the bony sockets for the root of a tooth. These three holes supported one tooth, as you can see from the opposite side of the jaw.

Oh, in case it’s not clear, the two lines are intended to indicate the cranium between the two eye sockets.

The Duck that held up the Traffic

This Mallard duck, followed by a companion drake, wandered over to the bench as we waited for the return ferry. As we had no bread to share we thought that she’d lose interest but she looked around then settled on the ground at Barbara’s feet, the drake standing close by. When the ferry arrived and the ramp rattled into place she stood up again and decided that now was the time to move – holding up the disembarking traffic as she waddled back unhurriedly to the waterside with her partner.