This is the distance, as a crow flies, between Leeds and Cape Town, South Africa and represents the UK’s importance for birds that winter in Africa and breed here. All wheatear spend their winters in central Africa and come spring, the various races travel to north Africa, northern Asia, Greenland, north-west Canada and Europe. The Greenland race is a passage migrant to the UK on its way to its Arctic breeding grounds. Their return journey is a non-stop 30 hour flight across 1,490 miles (or 2,400km) from Greenland to western Europe. And, all this is achieved by a bird weighing just 1oz and the oldest known bird made the annual trip over 9 years; that’s some air-miles.
Female wheatear on the edge of the ridge & furrow.
Currently birds streaming in from African locations and popping or dropping into St Aidan’s include osprey, hobby, little ringed plover, cuckoo, whinchat, yellow wagtail, chiffchaff, whitethroat, lesser whitethroat, common tern, sand martin, house martin, swallow, the warblers willow, grasshopper, sedge, reed and garden. Plus, blackcaps who also travel from Spain and Portugal. And why do they come? Genetic programming urges them to find the right conditions for nesting, raising and feeding their young.
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Over Bowers, a darting sand martin, near their ‘des-res’ sandbank.
Recent Sightings:
Around the site in their preferred habitats, are the singing males who arrived before the females, to claim a territory. The mixed woodland with thick undergrowth is attractive to blackcaps, chiffchaff, garden warbler, whitethroat and lesser whitethroat which prefers spiky blackthorn and hawthorn.
Male blackcap with a flat cap; male blackcap with a bouffant (when churr calling at rival).
Scrub, rough grass, young trees and shrubbery are targets for whinchat, sedge and willow warbler. The shy grasshopper warbler is more likely to be heard sending out its song, which sounds like the whirr of an angler’s reel, from thick scrub or thickets. The wheatear likes short grass and rocky/stony places as it nests in holes. The reed warbler lives up to its name and skulks low in dense reeds. The cetti’s warbler is calling out its fast, loud and explosive song, described by George Yeates, as “What yer …what yer … what yer … come-and-see-me-bet-you don’t… bet-you don’t” from the damp, dense scrub around Lowther’s lake.
Around the dragline/car park/visitor centre area are little owl, raven, stock dove and the kestrel pair. They actually use a scrape depression rather than a nest and sometimes the male will also incubate the eggs. Other birds of prey around the site include red kite, buzzard, marsh harrier, peregrine, sparrowhawk and hobby.
A kestrel does not move its head more than 6mm in any direction during a hover.
From the path with the ridge & furrow on one side and the hillside/pastures on the other, pink-footed geese, linnet, wheatear, stonechat, meadow pipit, skylark, lesser whitethroat, sedge warbler and whinchat, whose old Yorkshire name was “gorse chat”, which gives other shrubs to check. The warblers, along with cetti’s, cuckoo and green woodpecker are around Lowther lake and the wooded paths beyond the causeway.
The ridge and furrow and the adjacent Main lake are hosting lapwing, curlew, redshank, black-tailed godwit, ruff, oystercatcher, common sandpiper, snipe, ringed plover, little ringed plover, common tern, a pintail pair, cormorant, jackdaw, starling and yellow wagtail, who usually hang around by the cattle for the disturbed insects.
The female lapwing has a larger crest and larger ‘jazz hands’ than the male.
At Astley lake are reed and grasshopper warbler, with avocet, common tern, oystercatcher and three pairs garganey that also visit the Main lake/ridge & furrow area. Garganey is our only summer wildfowl and travels from Africa each year; only about 75 pairs breed in Britain. A generally quiet duck but should you hear “eh, eh, eh” it will be the male garganey.
Resting on a pole; a common tern surveys the locale.
Joining the sand martin more recently are house martin, swallow and swift to sweep up the insects over the waters and collectively build their numbers into the hundreds.
Around the reedbeds are pochard, sedge warbler, kingfisher, great crested grebe, wittering little grebe and bitterns (3 have been seen at same time and 2 heard booming simultaneously from both reedbeds). Sometimes bittern can actually appear blue instead of their usual camouflaging brown and cream. A fine dust, called powder down, from the breakdown of specialised feathers on raised pads on their body is worked into the plumage during preening to keep it free of slime from fish and eels. Depending on when last used the colour can vary from Eton blue to Oxford blue to even purple. Rain washes it off but should you see a giant blue-purple bird you can be reassured it is not a hallucination or a Muppet puppet.
The recent stars of the reedbed are the black-necked grebes, with a maximum sighting of 18. Not much bigger than a little grebe, these stunningly red-eyed with slicked back golden feathers are a UK rarity. They first bred in the UK in 1904. In 1930 in Ireland, a colony of 250 pairs were found but subsequent drying out of the wetland, possibly accelerated by a hydro-electric scheme meant, by 1960 they had all vanished. Today, there are only up to 40 pairs breeding in the UK.
Nicknamed in the past as ‘firey-eye’; black-necked grebe between frequent dives for food.
They have yet to disappear completely into the reeds before they become totally secretive to build their multiple floating nests before choosing the one to raise the next generation. They also choose to be near black-headed gull colonies and use the gulls’ alarm calls to alert them of danger.
Many thanks to our visitors who are honouring the requests on the signs placed in the reedbeds to keep disturbance to a minimum and giving them the space to continue to feel comfortable and secure at St Aidan’s.
Can’t fault the black-headed gull for ambition if not capability.
Brief visitors (i.e. passage migrants during April have included little gull, kittiwake, scaup on Lemonroyd, several whimbrel on the pastures, an osprey flyover and the terns sandwich and arctic. The arctic tern’s journey is the most epic travelling from their Antarctic winter homeland to the more-northerly parts of the northern hemisphere. And, what does it weigh? 14oz.
Also, the butterflies are beginning to emerge with sightings of brimstone, orange tip, peacock, tortoiseshell, comma and green-veined white.
And finally:
Aerobics; canada goose style
Yours, K Sp-8