BIRDS

Could be talking bollocks here, but i think it's a ritual they do when they're reunited - if they're like other albatrosses, they mate for life but spend months at a time out at sea so don't really see they much of each other, so this is them reaffirming their bond.

omg that’s the BEST explanationn
i support it fully, true or not <3

yeah that's what it is. sometimes the cutest explanation is the right one. but only here, on BIRDS

*rubs bills with imago*

Birbwatch

goldfinch 4
blue tits 2
chaffinch 2
jackdaw 4
black cap 1
blackbird 4
pied wagtail 1
magpie 1 for sorrow
collared dove 2
starling 2

(Gloucestershire garden, 10-11 today. sparrows and the robins very shy today, as we the other two magpies. goldfinches often flock in their 8s or 10s but not today. jackdaw numbers also low given that walking down the road you'll see a pair on every other chimney top)

i am being a bit sneaky and collating mine from various peeks over yesterday, today and tomorrow. you only put birdfood out when it's the garden birdwatch, imago! yeah but i've also had to revise the positioning and configuration of my feeders to desquirrel them. putting in the hours.

anyway. it's been parakeet city so far. a maximum of 6 in the frame at once. that aside, a couple of great tits, a couple of dunnocks, a wren, some woodpigeons, a blackbird. can hear some goldfinches so i'll count them. wondering whether it would be ethical to bung in the grey wagtail that's visited my garden a few times over the last couple of weeks. i mean it's so much more impressive than the others that i probably have to, right

love a nice grey wag! <3

anyone had any greenfinches recently? realised the other day that I haven't seen one for ages and there used to be loads round here

pretty sure i saw one an hour later, but didn't have the best view

there is a huge parakeet colony in my area and has been for decades. I saw this jogger the other day who was exclaiming surprise at seeing a group of them flying past. I presume wild ones must be quite rare outside of London because I've seen local newbies completely surprised at their presence a few times before.

yeah they seem to be insanely well-suited for both the uk climate and suburban living!

at my parents' i've seen far more greenfinches again in recent years; think they're having a bit of a resurgence after some very fallow years

fuck I THOUGHT I'd desquirrelled it but I just watched one of rhe bastards slowly size up and then successfully perform a leap of a metre sideways x a foot upwards from a fence to land on the peanut feeder. astonishing and hateful stuff, big respect

ah that's good news! I know that they really got walloped a few years back by that virus which was largely being transmitted by them congregating at birdfeeders xp

keep moving the feeder by a few inches just to see exactly how far a hungry squirrel can jump

that could be tomorrow's project...

Mark e smith otm re squirrels

My parents have parakeets visiting the feeder in their new garden in birmingham, the rspb says that they're only resident around london and elsewhere they're winter visitors. had only seen them in the distance before, clinging to a garden bird feeder they look massive!

they've been living wild in my area for at least 20 years according to an old bloke from the farm. I've been regularly seeing them for probably 10 years now.

all year round I should add.

need to get David Peace on the case, they are living in the rural end of Dewsbury, quite near where he grew up. I call London centric bullshit on the rspb here!

surprise birdwatch wildcard around these parts: a heron, which has been seen in gardens eyeing up the goldfish.

christ these cunts can shimmy up narrow metal poles too, game over. unless i construct some sort of conic obstacle

a sheath up the pole made from stacked large plastic drinks bottles with the bases cut off does that trick i believe.

'the trick', i just don't know what part of my brain these wild substitutions come from.

Just vaseline your pole imago, their momentum gets them about three feet up before they just slide back down again

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/new-yorkers-rover-bald-eagle-central-park-nyc

I took the day off from work so my wife and I could go look for a Sora that had been spotted this morning at a wetland preserve in the north suburbs. We saw two (!) and they totally made my week.

Oh awesome, congrats! We saw a sora unexpectedly while failing to see the cinnamon teal we were looking for and it was super exciting.

Birds outside my window had a 10-second conversation that I wish I could have recorded for you. It wasn't the usual call and response. What were they talking about?

Bought my wife a brilliant little transparent house-shaped feeder that suckers onto the kitchen window for our smaller birds to have a go on, instant joy.

Then a blackbird tried to land on it and couldn't settle so instead shat all over it in spite, BIRDS

bumper day for magpies down the park today. 18 in total, including one bopping around that was obviously new - slightly ill-defined feathers, making feed-me motions to the parents, but already like 80% the size of the parents

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/science/pandemic-nature-anthropause.html

there is a bird that appears to have a nest somewhere in the top of my overgrown hedge. I'm so crap at bird identification but it might be a starling. It keeps getting closer and closer to me and doesn't take flight if I move. Even my dog who chases pigeons is chill with it and just sits and curiously observes it hopping around the garden.

what are those birds outside every morning at about 5:30 (West London) making the comedy laser beam noises? whoop whoop. piaooooo.

I don't know but the Birdnet app should tell you.

it is none of these: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/bird-songs/what-bird-is-that/

Well, starlings are mimics, so their range of sounds is much wider than what is represented there. Plus they commonly congregate in urban areas. So my money is on our dear old friend Sturnus vulgaris.

Maybe someone's been playing the Go-Kart Mozart version of Roger Whittaker's New World in the Morning within their earshot, who knows?

Could well be ring-necked parakeets? Noisy bastards.

whoop whoop piaaaaooooo definitely sounds like a starling

i love how starlings talk! i once heard two of them quietly making car alarm sounds to each other and it was mighty cute i tell ya

i think it'll be too quiet to get a recording (and f downloading an app just for this tbh). will try and spot the culprit(s) tomorrow.

there was a 4am blackbird but I've not heard him for a while. every morning, just before it started getting light. and then he'd stop.

Someone on the street whistles after a woman. It is the characteristic two-note whistle. It may or may not be the same subject and object each time.

In some highly evolved species, there might be a separate whistle to denote the various types of attraction by the gender of the subject and the object and the nature of the attraction. This would be better than pronouns if outside of this it did not matter.

A pigeon made a nest in the tree in my garden and has been a constant presence for the last month. It would never leave the nest or at least I'd never seen it leave so I presume it was protecting a bairn. I noticed two days ago it had gone + hasn't been sighted since. Then today I noticed a dead squab in the garden directly below the nest. It has definitely been killed by another bird because there is a big grotesque hole in it that looks consistent with having its flesh eaten by a beak or beaks. I was wondering if a bird of prey did this or maybe there could be other squabs up there that decided to eat their sibling when ma didn't return.

could have been a magpie. They will dine on pigeon given the opportunity

I get annoyed with pigeons when they shit on me or on my bins or all over the path to my front door, but feel genuinely sad about this.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fc4GMyqWIAI9cdM?format=jpg&name=small

happier days for my pigeon friend.

a zillion redwings on the tree just outside my window, right on Snow Day cue. it does have berries after all

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-gloucestershire-64458219

could see a section of this out of our back window whilst home at Christmas but the main event seems to have been above the local park about 500 yds away

(starling murmuration)

I do the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch every year on the last w/e of January. One spends an hour counting them. In our garden this year we had:

blue tit 7, great tit 4, blackbird 2, long-tailed tit 2, coal tit 1, dunnock 2, blackcap 2, nuthatch 2, great spotted woodpecker 1, robin 2, starling 2, goldcrest 1.

This is the biggest species diversity we've had by far in the decade or so we've been living in our house. And there are species that visit occasionally that didn't deign to appear during that hour, including wood pigeon, pied wagtail, magpie, chaffinch and goldfinch.

It helps that we feed them a lot! Fat balls, suet pellets, peanuts, seed mix, mealworms and Flutter Butter (peanut butter for birds).

On one occasion we had a parakeet. There are probably 6 or so breeding pairs within Oxford...they hang out in the University Parks apparently. They've been going further up the Thames year by year. I saw some in Old Windsor in 2018 and that was the first I'd seen them outside SW London.