Bird News

From the Guardian...

Also today, BBC Radio 4's Today programme featured - at 7.46am if you want to listen again online - a piece about the RSPB worrying that migrant birds are outstaying their welcome and threatening native species such as the sparrow [by competing with them for feed].

The report explains that the RSPB will now send out traps to everybody who took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch (all 400,000 of you, well done!) to catch the foreign finches and return them to their native country - Denmark. One of these traps is named the 'Moggy' and is apparently very effective at taking wild birds.
(Another link the story can be found - here.)

Other bird news today includes dazzling footage from a new BBC series about evolution, which shows footage of a recent discovered colony of flying Penguins. Stunning stuff.


Okay, fair cop, let's check today's date. How fascinating it is though that birds should feature in two big April Fool's jokes this year. I think we expect to be amazed by them, and as fanciful as they are, there's the truth in these stories. It's birds being brilliant again folks!

BGBW Reminder

Take part because the testy Robin says so!

Just a reminder to everybody that this weekend (26th-27th Jan) is the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch - your chance to participate in the huge national bird census the conservation charity organises annually. Check out the website for more - an hour is all it takes and time spent enjoying the undervalued wildlife we all have out there the other side of the kitchen window, all of it contributing to the RSPB's understanding of the influences affecting bird populations.
I'll post my results on Monday.

In other news, my birding activities have taken a backseat to the house-hunt for now. As a reward for last weekend's endeavours the girlfriend gave me 30 minutes at the Ogston Reservoir gull roost. Time well spent as one of those lovely mottled marble 1st-winter Glaucous Gulls (like this one) settled in the ranks.
He'll be an inland wanderer spending the winter feeding at local rubbish dumps, and hatched last year probably somewhere in Greenland. Isn't it wonderful what faraway birds turn up Britain?

Interestingly, a chap told me the Iceland Gull I saw on the 1st of the month, is potentially a Kumlien's Gull, the Canadian subspecies and a much rarer vagrant to Britain (1 or 2 per year in my region). The ID differences are small (these gulls have faint markings on their wingtips rather than pure white), and it's a fine judgment I couldn't make for myself with adequate confidence. The reappraisal came from club members at Ogston.
For me, perhaps it's bad birding to dismiss worries over the exact identification but I can live by just letting these things go from time to time. Among all the regular gulls, it sure was a shimmering stunner.

Big Garden Birdwatch: My Results

We scored a pretty usual spread for our garden during our hour, although a surge in Blackbirds seems to have coincided with the berries on our pyracantha coming into maturity. Quite a relief really, as we rarely saw even one during the summer (around the same time the new neighbours next door brought their cat into our little ecosystem).
A Sparrowhawk circled over at one point and everything panicked. We sat for half an hour before any birds returned. If we do have a star bird, it's probably our pair of Stock Dove, although only the one showed up for our count.

Our results read:

6 Blackbird
5 Collard Dove
1 Feral Pigeon
1 Stock Dove
2 Blue Tit
10 House Sparrow
1 Dunnock

We'd surely have more if it weren't for the fact that our suburb is only 25 years old, so there are very few mature trees around.

(Big Garden Birdwatch)