BIRDS

Is it a good time of year to go to Slimbridge Wetlands Centre?

nice weather for ducks. (don't know)

we had 10 (count them) goldfinches on our tiny tree over christmas.

Niger seed?

re SWC : from the website it appears that more stuff will be happening at the end of jan.

also, it hasn't stopped raining here for days now (i live quite near), and cant imagine it being overly pleasant there.

Is it a good time of year to go to Slimbridge Wetlands Centre?

Would be better if it was much colder and frozen, I reckon that with the relatively mild weather and all the rain, then all the native wildfowl and waders will be distributed over the surrounding countryside. Never been but I think Slimbridge has a collection of captive birds so there will be all of them and they probably have feeding stations and managed habitat for wild songbirds so there might be good numbers of those. Might be a chance of all the other birds pulling in some raptors too, so I think you've got as good a chance of seeing stuff there as you would have anywhere else.

i enjoy birds but there's something undeniably sinister about them as well

Just refilled the feeder outside my office window. Birds get happy, and it's a home entertainment system for the cats and me.

Thing I love about birds is the sense that they're so at one with their environment. You watch them doing their birdy things and going about their birdy business and you get this sense that at one birdy level they know so many secret things about how life works in the local area... funny little rhythms of life that we're not privy to, when and where it is that all the bugs start hatching out, whose garden to visit for frostbitten rosehips when the winter takes hold, what bush you can safely shelter in on a cold, wet night, stuff like that. Also the sense of vulnerability you get from them - most birds are living on a knife-edge when it comes to finding enough edible calories especially in competition with everything else out there, or when they're dodging hazards like cats and hawks and humans and whatnot. You know you're cushioned from a lot of that stuff as a human, you don't have the same vital day to day struggles, but at the same time you do get some inkling of the fragility and specialness of life.

birds are more it's true

more REAL damn

i've grown to enjoy parakeets in winter, for their incoongruity and resilience, even if i still tire of them in summer

Ha well they're the other end of things, they just tough it out in a big unruly mob and don't give a flying fuck for local sensibilities. Hanging out at the local rugby club, shitting fruity shits on flash motors, I'm all for it.

that is an excellent description of why birds are interesting
they have to be observant if they want to survive
people sure don't

Otmoor supposed to be good for starlings/murmuration at the moment - apparently from 1530 onwards - if any of you are Oxford-based or thereabouts.

http://www.wildlife-photography.uk.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/720-grey-wagtail-IMG_2795.jpg

^ One of these snazzy little fellows has taken up residence by the puddle on the flat roof right outside my office window.

waxwings.

i had never seen a waxwing until this afternoon. saw one on the floor, wondered what it was. then noticed another dozen in the bush next to it. hid around the corner whilst i got the camera out only to find i was stood under a tree with another dozen in the branches...

they aren't native to uk, but there were some stories of flocks of them visiting a couple of years ago, feeding on berries (which these were)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3396938/Waxwing-leads-Russian-invasion.html

(my photos sucked)

oh man, waxwing envy here. good spot koogs!

Yes, nice spot. Have never seen a waxwing.

Some good pics here: http://fair-isle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/henry-waxwings-hand-feeding-again.html

Am amazed how much a starling murmuration cheers me up - was sat in a traffic jam on the way home, watching a thousand or so starlings swooping over the local Harvester. Fucking beautiful.

acquainted the mrs with a long-tailed tit today, she was most enthused. mad love for that grey wagtail, dippy li'l chap I'm sure

<3 long tailed tits. we get them in the park

there's a waxwing sightings tweet feed here: https://twitter.com/WaxwingsUK lot of them about by the look.

We had two groups of long tailed tits at one point, of seven and eight birds. But I never see more than three at a time now. Wondering if they've dispersed or died.

i see mixed flocks containing long tailed tits and great tits. i think flock size varies with time of year (fledging? food?) have seen largish flocks in the last year.

There was great footage on Winter Watch of long tailed tits roosting: the first two to sit on the branch remained on the outside (ie. the coldest bit) and the rest would squeeze themselves in the middle. There didn't seem to be any shift or rotation in this to keep the outside birds warm.

really want to start a band and call it Mixed Tit Flock

thought i saw a bullfinch this morning but it was high enough up that it cd've been a waxwing

nah it was a bullfinch, just checked the calls

Today's posts itt dear to my heart. One of 2012's highlights for me was finally seeing Cedar Waxwings. And we have a pet starling who is my special buddy.

Anyone been up to Otmoor recently? We're starting to get starlings gathering about five miles away. Wondering how it's looking on the reserve?

Fairly good murmuration over the Harvester in Kidlington, this evening, around 1745.

I realise this is quite specific and not much use to most people ...

I wish ppl here in the US admired starlings like you guys do. They're v hated here.

this is interesting, about the way they were introduced into america

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Starling#North_America

Help needed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFklknp6lWE

could be wrong but i reckon that's a song thrush there myself. very short phrases that are sometimes repeated once or twice with a definite pause before moving on to the next phrase. sung from up in a tree too - i've got a hunch that nightingales sing from lower down in cover, plus their song has got lots of weird alien clicks and laser gun trills.

this is a song thrush:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWSyv_E8Pxc

nightingale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INzqozVbYL8

Hummingbirds showed up here 3 weeks ago and have been freezing their asses off.

it's the repetition inside each line that's the big difference to my ears. the song thrush is all dat-dat dat-dat dat-dat weeeee, whereas nightingale is just all over the place in a brrrrrrrr-brip-be-bap-deeeeet--zuuuuuel kinda way xp

do you feed the hummingbirds wmc?

here's the thing, though - the bird I saw (and you can just about see it in the video) didn't seem to have any markings on its underside

next time I'll have my binoculars on me

Nick -- yes, we have feeders on the back deck and outside my office window.

must be amazing, would never get any work done if i were at your desk

lj - guess it'll be there again tomorrow, same time, same place. always think of nightingales as very secretive things, would be nice to get a good sight of one. on our dog walk today we had whitethroats dodging around in the gorse. swifts have come back too, best birds ever

this is better nightingale film btw, this one sounds really goddamn song thrushy too i'm getting more confused the more i listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enOsGUdyjmc&NR

maybe you have to see them live or something but in a way they're a bit overrated imo, i reckon robins and dunnocks have far prettier songs. best one i hear regularly though is the wren. really long complex energetic lines, they're like the john coltranes of the bird world doing this sheets of sound thing. really blast it out for such diddy fuckers too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EAzaDSN70o

otm, wren song has been avant-garde for millennia

was definitely drawn out of my way to the nightingale/curiously unspotted songthrush tho. something about the song was arresting and alien - I was, as they say, compelled from my orbit, and the dog had to sit patiently while I drank it in, not at all feeling like I was riding the Romantics' steez

A gila woodpecker has made a nest at the top of a saguaro in my front yard. This is very exciting to me! This hole 16 feet up constantly emitting baby bird rasps with a mom periodically flying in and out.

A dove has taken up residence in our back yard. It doesn't seem injured, but it spends all its time on the ground, just hanging out, nestled down in the lawn except when our dog it out doing his business and barking at oxygen molecules. I wondered if it's a fledgling that doesn't quite know where to go next, but my daughter says she's seen its mate come around to it a few times a day.

our neighbours have installed a nest-box roughly 1 metre away from our bedroom window, currently occupied by a family of Great Tits. the parents approach the box cautiously, hopping all the way down the fence to a chorus of wheedling. needless to say, we're enthused