Has anyone seen any yet? I often see flocks of them flying over our rural office in the autumn / winter but not spotted any yet!
Can't wait for them to arrive in Shropshire! Determined to get decents pics of them this year!!
"All weeds are flowers, once you get to know them" (Eeyore)
My photos on Flickr
So they're here then!
This morning our county bird recorder announced:
"Just want to alert people to the amazing spectacle that's currently happening - huge numbers of Redwings are passing over the Lodge. In two hours this morning I counted 21551 passing over the Pinnacle just above Sandy!"
It seems like this movement has started to dry up but the continuing watchers up there have just seen three Ring Ouzels over too! Must have been an amazing morning. I was quite pleased to see 32 over the school playground as I was dropping the kids off. But 21 thousand....
For more information and to find your nearest Feed the Birds Day events, visit www.rspb.org.uk/feedthebirds
Wow! Never seen that many!!
Am still VERY interested to know how these counts are carried out please!
I'm not sure I've ever seen ANY. As for the count, me too - we didn't get an answer last time, did we MarJus?
The necessity of bird-watching is a really good reason for avoiding all forms of housework.
The dust will still be there tomorrow - the birds may not be!
Hi,
Sorry, didn't notice you'd asked that question but can answer it for you. Steve was up dawn from 6.55 to 9.25 and kept a tally. Most flocks were small but constant. So a group of 30, group of 25, group of 50, 150, 200 etc all written down as they pass. I think the biggest group was around 500. He told me his Redwing counts covered three pages of his notebook! This is far and above any Redwing count we've ever had in Bedfordshire. As for accuracy, a flock of 500 may in fact be 520 or 480 but for this scale of movement, it doesn't really matter too much. Steve says after he left there were in fact five Ring Ouzels, a Crossbill and three Bramblings.
Richard
Thanks for that Richard. I think the question we asked might have been on another thread which referred to a huge count. I, in a little humorous aside, suggested "one poor bloke with a clicker-counter". I now get the impression from your reply that, actually, I wasn't THAT far off the mark!
No - you're spot on. Clicker counters are used for wildfowl counts and gull roosts especially. For very big flocks overhead, generally people count 50 or 100 quickly and work out how many 50s or 100s there are - not exact but the best you can do in the time.
By the way, these flocks or Redwings were very high up this morning - and perhaps not so obvious unless you're were on high ground.
Thanks for the explanation Richard! I admire anyone that can do this as I struggle with counting a few birds at the nature reserves just lo write them up in the log book! They move about or else are close together so I'm never really sure! The other day I had a new 'obstacle'! Perfect reflections of the curlew I was trying to count... so I may have doubled up on a couple!!
The other thing I find incredible is that a minute proportion of 'other birds' (ring ouzel, bramling etc...) can be spotted when the huge majority is the redwings!! Quite amazing! I photographed a large flock of finches the other day and only on looking at the photo did I see that they were mainly goldfinches with a few linnets mixed in! How many? Well I don't know that I could say without counting each bird on the photos!!
Ahh well - maybe you are able to relax and enjoy the wildlife in front of you without worrying about obsessively counting them! - In Bedfordshire we have to work hard to see anything so we're all pretty keen and getting involved with surveys and undertaking counts like this are all part of it. All this information is fed through to the county Natural History Society at the end of the year for the annual report.
As for the other birds - maybe the odd Ring Ouzel was mixed in. The five went over after the main Redwing passage so were easy to pick out. Crossbill and Bramblings are identified by call - if they didn't make a noise as they passed, they just go down as finch sp. probably - the views aren't great most of the time. But still pretty impressive overall to see migration happening on this scale.
They're back...........Yippeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!
Out and about on the local patch for a couple of hours this afternoon, first up was a brief view of a small flock (c20) redwings overhead, then as we were heading home spotted some chaffinches drinking from a puddle in the lane, thought a couple of them looked a bit 'on the large size' so a quick look with the binoculars confirmed Fieldfares, obviously a bit thirsty after a long trip. There was a flock of 12 in all and spent several minutes watching them dart in and out of the hedges.
Autumn is definitely here now..........hopefully off to Titchwell and Cley over the next couple of days to see what else has thrown itself at the Norfolk coast.
"Feed the birds, tuppence a bag" Mary Poppins