With the first week of March nearly over our chough should start nest building any day now. The first date in 2014 was 9th March, with the final pair not starting until 21st March. Most of the regular pairs are together in their territories and are bust feeding up in readiness for the rigours of the breeding season to come.
Its been a little surprising to see at least 3 of the regular pairs in groups of 3. In our experience its not usually a good sign! It is documented that pairs will sometimes end up with a third bird helping feed chicks. This additional 'helper' is usually a young pre-breeder that has yet to find a territory of its own. However in over 20 years of annual nest site watches on Ramsey there are no records that this has ever happened here. In fact the opposite is usually true. All the 'menage-a-trois' encounters we have witnessed have ended in breeding failure as the presence of the third bird becomes too much of a distraction and the pairs (usually the male) spend so much time trying to 'see off' the interloper that the small matter of raising chicks gets pushed to one side.
In our experience three chough is never usually a good sign!
It could be a good sign in some ways. Ramsey has limited breeding sites and, given territory size, the usual 7-9 pairs is probably the carrying capacity of the island. It could mean that good numbers of first and second year birds have survived the winter and are looking for sites of their own. With no vacancies they might be trying to muscle in on existing pairs. One of the pairs 'affected' is that containing our oldest known chough who is 15 this year - see here - maybe the others sense his time is coming to an end?
Or it could just be that following the tight social groups that formed over winter the bond between these birds is still there and it will take a little more persuasion for the youngsters to take the hint!
We will keep you posted on chough activity over the coming weeks, its never dull!
The harbour chough pair are very active at the moment and should start nest building within a week
Another member of the corvid family is already well underway with nestbuilding. Today it was a joy to watch our east coast pair of raven busily trekking from their nest site past the front of the house in their quest for fresh nesting material. Two days ago they were taking large dead heather twigs, today the twigs were much smaller. Watching them made a nice change from cleaning as we took a coffee break!
Raven carrying nesting material this afternoon - the islands old Norse name was Hrafens-ey (which morphed over time to become Ramsey) - it means 'Raven's Island'