BIRDS

<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

turkeys outside my window at 5:00 this morning. lobblelobblelobble. they've gone all huge, fat and wattley for summer. it's shooting season, so all the little country stores are selling "turkey supplies". by which they mean things with which to murder the beasts.

Went for a walk down the Thames foreshore at lunch and there were 2 Canadian geese with 3 goslings, so cute. Loads of geese around today, 3 different types. They're pretty tame, we were walking by really close and they just eyed us a bit and went back to napping.

there are swifts that fly around my neighbourhood, screaming, which is cool.

but today i was at hyde park's round pond and the swifts there, with all the extra space (and the high wind) were mental. 30 or so of them, down to about a foot off the water at times.

Feeding on midges I guess. Swifts are great, we always get a few pairs round here. A couple of years ago we found a baby one sitting on the pavement, didn't really know what to do with him/her, didn't really want them to be got by a cat so I picked them up and put them on a wall. So amazingly light! But he/she had these really horrible big lice things scuttling around on their plummage, tried to knock them off but they were really flat in profile and kept sliding in down under the feathers. Weird alien looking beasts. Anyhow, pretty sure the fledgling didn't survive cos I think I'm right in saying that swifts can't take off from the ground (wings too long, legs too short), so there's no way a parent could land to feed them.

Oh it was the swift lousefly, a parasite that is specific to swifts:

http://cdn1.arkive.org/media/15/15605FC2-2238-4770-9713-420ED99B6244/Presentation.Large/1-2-day-old-common-swift-chicks-in-nest-with-swift-lousefly-Crataerina-pallida.jpg

I love the swifts that come out at dusk around here, chattering their little hearts out while they fill up on bugs. I grew up hearing them called chimneysweeps instead of chimney swifts.

The ones we get here don't chatter, they scream instead, such a great sound.

They've been sounding incredible on my walk to work in a morning. That screeching! It does my head in a bit to think that they travel from Africa and end up on the side streets of Cowley Road, Oxford.

My starling is getting his white speckly beard and eyebrows in response to god knows what seasonal signal.

back in Italy for the month, god the birdlife here is fabulous. my latest avian crush would have to be the female & juvenile red-backed shrikes I espied perching not five metres from me at the tops of isolated stalks in a roadside field. what delightful little birds - unless you're an even littler bird

they don't even budge when you come close - amazing confidence. but then again they're quite closely related to crows, so their self-aggrandising bastardry is assured

never seen a shrike before. thought they'd be bigger. but I knew almost instantly what they were when I saw their regal, hawkish repose. imagine a warbler with *attitude*, like as gallus as all jeremy, and that's a shrike

I'd love to see a shrike!

Now you can. This landmark in wildlife photography was achieved earlier this afternoon with a cameraphone and a pair of binoculars:

http://i.imgur.com/bCPJFjC.jpg

The decline of kingfishers in the UK is shocking ...

That's v sad. One of my favorite birds in its North American iteration. Halcyon days no longer...

the rivers are fucked and the land is following them

HEY so I'm in Cyprus right now (posting to ILX, I know), and without having to move from my seat I just saw in plain view a jaunty flock of Sardinian Warblers. Neat little birds. Might have a wander outside with the binoculars, see what else there is

just saw a buzzard, couldn't tell if it was a Long-Legged Buzzard or a Steppe Buzzard (which is, boringly, a subspecies of the Common Buzzard). aaargh!

I guess that Cyprus must be a stopping-off point for lots of migrants moving from Europe to Africa, so it's probably a great time of year to see all sorts of species there.

ps bring me back a lammergeyer okay?

yeah i figured it'd be the perfect time to visit. if i see a lammergeier i will endeavour to photograph it