They're Grrreeeaaat!

Some birds have the moniker of Great.

All of them deserve it in their own way.

For example, the Great Bustard Group in Hampshire is working hard to reintroduce the Great Bustard back into the British countryside. The Great Bustard is truly a great bird … as in big!

The one we are most familiar with of course is the Great Tit, a common garden visitor up and down the country. The Great Tit is great, as it is a fantastic bird to learn your first song. Their simple two syllable call sounds like someone whistling “teacher-teacher-teacher”.

An increasingly common garden visitor is the Great Spotted Woodpecker. Keep your ears open over the next few weeks to hear the males drumming tree trunks to develop territories and to try and attract mates. The Great Spotted Woodpecker is a great bird to learn your first male/ female identification trick. The male keeps his red cap at the back of his head as he matures, the female does not. Spare a moments thought though for the slightly disappointedly named Middle Spotted Woodpecker, found only in continental Europe. Clearly it was discovered after the Great and rarer Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers had been named and had to be shoe horned in!

But there is one bird right now which will hold the undisputed title of being great. Over the coming weeks one of nature’s greatest courtship rituals will be taking place in a lake near you.

Great Crested Grebes are about to start strutting their stuff! Over the past few days I have been on the lookout for these love birds showing signs of pairing up. We are lucky here in South Wales to live in a bit of a hotspot for Great Crested Grebes, with Roath Park being one of the best places to watch them at close quarters. There are at least six Grebes at Roath and Newport Wetlands right now, and I was lucky enough to witness at least part of their amazing courtship dance.

Both birds approach each other and then perform an extravagant head turning display, each bird mimicking the others movement. The next part of the display is quite breath-taking. The birds dive and come back to the surface with a beak of full of weeds. They then extend to full height and continue the head flicking movements with the weeds in their beaks. It really is quite a privilege to watch.

Great Crested Grebes are simply great as they are birders bird, one of my favourites, stunning to look at, fascinating to study, and of course, if it wasn’t for the Great Crested Grebe you wouldn’t be reading this blog at all! Why? Well that’s a topic for another blog!

If you want to see some of this extraordinary courtship behaviour, have a look at this YouTube footage taken at the Saltholme RSPB Reserve.