We been watching the fledgling rooms from our nearby rookery hop around this week. But over the last few days we’ve found ten dead ones. No trauma, just expired. Is this something well known?? Only just moved in so not sure if to expect this every year!
Sounds odd/suspicious. Where had they "expired"......out in the open in a field/on a lawn?
The rookery is directly behind our house, with the driveway in between. They are in the garden, along the driveway, one in the compost (I think it has been eatibg bugs from there for 24hrs) one under our outside furniture. There’s a large area of brambles around their trees, I can only guess how many may have ended up in there unseen. They seem to hop around for 24/48 hours APPARENTLY healthy, but then just die. Very distressing!
Worth a trail camera? Dead bodies left just lying around in a fairly enclosed private area suggest either a cat (they don't always mangle prey), something they're eating, or possibly disease.
Compost.......I don't suppose horse manure has been added?
Definitely no manure. Just garden clippings, and nothing new for months. We do have several Blink cameras around the exterior and haven’t caught anything except the odd hate or pheasant but that may be luck rather than an actual absence of cats…it’s a possibility one is having a field day
Hi --i have a rookery of 75 nests in my garden and can assure you mass deaths of young is not unusual ! As the weather has been so good recently the rooks will have been able to rear most to a larger feather stage...whereas in bad weather you will find dead naked young a few days old on the ground as they die by the dozen and are thrown out by the parents.
I have noticed that many birds that are 'abandoned' and wandering about on the ground tend to die in a few days...particularly at the younger/non.flyers stage -- and i suspect they have been identified by the parent bird as 'handicapped' in some way. The reason i say this - - i know someone who collects such abandoned young/saves them/etc to hand-rear and many grow up to be deformed/spastic etc in some way or other...which seems to vindicate this view.
Once they grow feathers to a much larger stage the fledgling will move out into the branches, and many drop to lower branches, and also to the ground. If the local dog walker doesn't chew them up, or Mr Fox on his regular circuit looking for his lunch, the as you say many can be found wandering around and succumb. Am guessing they are 'lost' or being ignored by the parents who may be feeding other easily seen young elsewhere--who knows ?
I always pick up grounded young and using a ladder put high up a tree out of harms way..but then the next day many are found dead on the ground. But there seems to be no guaranteed outcome, as this year i have picked up 6 young birds (all non.flyers) and placed back up a tree (every day/even twice a day)---or launched them back to higher safety, and some 5 days later they are still wandering about and survivng...but i can still catch them as still non.flyers. So far none of these birds (all been ringed so identifiable) have been found dead. But another year it will be a different story with carcasses everywhere...so maybe outcome survival depends upon combination of weather, and /or too many mouths to feed with limited food resources ?
Thank you for that…really informative. Ours is a massive rookery…I’m guessing therefore this may be exactly what you’re talking about. It’s seems to have tapered off in the last two days..far fewer wandering / succumbing. Hopefully everyone else survives!
That does make sense. The ground here is like concrete so I can imagine if similar in Elizabeth’s area, starvation/abandonment is very possible. I should have thought of that.