Archive for category: News

From a hot July to a cool August.  However, we are not having a bad summer.  The sea temperature off Brighton went up to at least 19°C in early August, but has dropped back to about 17°C now.  The swifts have returned to Africa, and the other migrants are following their example gradually.  Some of the last to leave will be the swallows and house martins which can have 2 or 3 broods during their stay in Britain.  A few swallows are even remaining in the West Country over winter in recent years.  This is interesting and probably due to milder winters allowing the insects they feed on to fly through the winter.

Vivien and I took a group of teenagers to an International Youth Camp in arctic Finland recently, and it was interesting to see the differences in natural history there.  There are very few people, and many more trees of fewer types, mainly spruce, pine, birch, aspen, rowan and willow in order of apparent frequency.  The trees were shaped by the winter snow and were tall and narrow.  There were very few birds, except around human habitation where they seem to take advantage of human activity.  There was a bird, not found in Britain, called a Siberian Jay (or Kukkoli in Finnish).  This bird lives all over the Eurasian arctic, and is attracted by human camp fires where it expects to find food.  It is not afraid of humans, and if you hold up a sausage or other food it will perch on your hand and eat it without fear.  Other birds that I saw were willow tits, bullfinches, great tits and near houses – blue tits, house sparrows and feral pigeons.  I also saw swifts, swallows and house martins being hunted by a merlin.  There were also wood grouse or capercaillies there.

Reindeer were wandering everywhere, grazing freely on anything they could find, especially lichens (reindeer grass).  Red squirrels are frequently seen playing in the trees.  There are frequent wild flowers of different types, and the commonest is rose-bay-willow-herb.  Often known in Britain as fire weed.  It is all along the road sides and forest tracks.  There are also copious bilberry plants rich in fruit, and also delicious cloud berries.

The animals that all the campers will never forget were the midges and the mosquitos.  These came out after every shower of rain and fed on humans!

It is now late June and mid-summer.  Our part of the world seems full of flowers and buzzing insects.  Butterflies by day and moths by night flutter around like angels.  Soon we will hear stridulating male grasshoppers singing among the meadows trying to attract a mate.  This flurry of insects is timely for the cornucopia of fledged birds that have left the nest.  The numbers of insects available will ultimately control the numbers of insectivorous birds that survive.  However, if you feed the birds consistently, more birds and more insects should survive because you are raising the carrying capacity of the environment.

Nature is generally balanced, with a bottom up pyramid of numbers, for example, many thousands of tons of leaves absorb nitrogen and carbon from the air and ground to cover our trees each year with a verdant green coat which absorbs energy from the sun.  However many thousands of caterpillars will eat a proportion of those leaves.  One family of blue tits (say 9 babies and 2 adults) requires between 700 and 1000 caterpillars each day to keep it fed.  When those baby blue tits leave the nest at the same time (early June) as many other families of small birds, these provide food for the families of sparrowhawks which require about 400 grams of meat each day. That is about 40 blue tits.  However, if all this did not happen we would be overwhelmed with caterpillars and blue tits as every animal only has to replace itself in its life-time to maintain a stable population.  In the past, human mortality was higher, and regulated the population of people, but now we are regulated by health care and birth control.  Our developing intelligence, technology and decision making is taking over from disease, war and famine.  Although these things still exist in parts of the world.  Human pressures on the world (7 billion people, and increasing) is the greatest threat to the survival of our natural world.  Let us hope that our collective decision making can progressively ameliorate that threat.

Uckfield and district is very good at preserving nature.  Trees are encouraged to exist with at least 2 Woodland Trust reserves (Lake Wood and Views Wood), 2 local Nature Reserves (West Park and Hempstead Meadows), one Site of Special Scientific Importance (Buxted Park).  And several Sites of Nature Conservation Importance.

One of the scientific tasks that Vivien and I do each year is to participate in the National Breeding Bird Survey.  To do this we survey a single kilometre square that has been randomly allocated to us by the local section of the British Trust for Ornithology.  Our square is just SE of Ringmer.  The survey involves getting up at 05:00 hrs. on a bright calm morning and walking 2 transects of the square.  This is done twice, once in the early part of the breeding season usually during early April, and again in the later weeks, usually in June.  We did our early visit yesterday (12th April).  We were delighted to hear our first cuckoo, whitethroat and lesser whitethroats.  Each of these had flown all the way from Africa to sing to us that morning, and we did appreciate it.

Cuckoos specialise in feeding on hairy caterpillars, well I suppose something has to.  They can lay up to twenty-five eggs, each one in the nests of other birds.  Each cuckoo tends to be a specialist at using a host species of a particular type, for example robin, dunnock, meadow pipit and wren, but around 100 different host species can be used.

When the laying of eggs is over, all adult cuckoos fly back to Africa again, usually by July.  Apparently, cuckoos are rather promiscuous, and will mate with any cuckoo of the opposite gender that they encounter.  To do that, the male sings its famous cuckoo song to attract a female, or the female makes a kind of bubbly call to attract a male.  After they mate, the female has to go off to find the nest of its chosen host and lay just one egg in it.  She then goes off to mate again and find another nest until she has no more eggs left.  The adults then fly back to Africa, leaving their young to be raised by their chosen host.
The thing I find amazing is that the baby cuckoos never meet their parents.  However, they still know what calls to make when they return the next year, and more amazing still, know that they have to fly back to Africa, and not only that, but they know the way!

A plant that flowers at about the time the cuckoos arrive is the beautiful pink/purple cuckoo flower, also known as ladies smock and milkmaids.  This year has been particularly good for this plant with a particularly good showing on the Little Horsted roundabout on the A22/A26 intersection on the Uckfield Bypass.

Signs of spring are all around!  Today (16th February) was probably the best day we have had for weather for about two months!  We had almost wall to wall sunshine with a few fair weather cumulus clouds, and hardly a breeze.  Last night there was a chorus of frogs in my pond, and this morning there were several clumps of spawn to add to the clump that appeared a few days ago.  This morning as I pruned a hornbeam tree in my garden, I spotted three common buzzards soaring a thermal in the sky above my house.  Earlier, a blue tit was sussing out a nest-box on one of my oak trees.  I saw several celandines in flower today to add to crocuses and daffodils also seen.

Yesterday I saw hawthorn leaves breaking bud and heard a great-spotted woodpecker hammering in Nightingale Wood.  Today I visited Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, and among the groups of herring and lesser black-backed gulls I saw black-headed gulls with black heads, which they only develop when getting ready for the breeding season in the spring.  Many spring plants are pushing through.  The Alexanders has been bushing up for some time, and its relative, cow parsley is already carpeting some woodland floors.  Birds singing on territory include blue tit, song thrush, blackbird and mistle thrush.  Chaffinches are also singing on territory with the full song.  They take time to develop their song in the spring, but they have developed early this year.  House sparrows are eagerly cheeping and chasing each other through garden hedge-rows.  Almost every living thing was delighting in the good weather today.

Meanwhile, in the lagoons of Rye Harbour, I was delighted to see about 100 golden plover, and similar numbers of grey plover and lapwing.  There were little grebes and tufted ducks diving under the water for food, and flocks of dunlin flying around changing colour as they changed direction again and again just for the joy of living.  There were dozens of oyster catchers and curlews loafing on the islands and giving their occasional ethereal call, and redshank calling as if they were telling someone off for being there.  Then to my delight towards the end of my visit, I saw three gadwall ducks, two males with their black bottoms and one female (all brown).  This scarcely seen duck is beginning to breed in Sussex in recent years, but used to be mainly a winter visitor.  But its breeding stronghold is Rye Bay.

It is mid-winter, but the dawn chorus has started.  The songthrush was singing loudly this morning, as was the robin.  Robins are unusual as the female also sings during the winter, and both sexes defend a feeding site.  Robins have become closely associated with humans, and quickly become tame if a relationship is established.  Robins are not averse to entering buildings especially during the winter:

“The north wind doeth blow and we shall have snow, and what will the robin do then, poor thing, he will sit in the barn and keep himself warm, and tuck his head under his wing.  Poor thing.” (Anon).

Now is the time to keep the bird table stocked with food.  Birds particularly like fat during the winter as they use it for insulation and energy store.  Because the nights are so long, most birds cannot feed during the night, so have to stock up on high energy food during the roughly 9 hours of daylight.  As knowledge of the food supply spreads through the local avifauna, you will find that you are rewarded with visits from increasing numbers and varieties of birds.  Probably the first bird to find new food will be a robin, but blue tits, house sparrows and starlings may soon be close behind.  Then there will be blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, chaffinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, great tits, long-tailed tits and great-spotted woodpeckers.  Woodpigeons will also visit if you are near trees, and collared doves may also visit as they, like robins, are usually associated with people.  You may also have visits from the local squirrel who will dominate the table if given half a chance, and all this activity may attract the local sparrowhawk who also needs to survive in the only way it knows, and that is to eat small birds.  After all we eat chickens, ducks, pheasants partridges and quail, so we should not begrudge a sparrowhawk a meal.   It is difficult to not have favourites as an ornithologist, and to make value judgements.  Some people still persecute magpies, sparrowhawks, crows and pigeons.  However, nature has a way of establishing a balance, and we should not usually interfere with that on the grounds of favouritism.  These animals do not choose their parents (as far as we know) so they have to live according to the genes that they inherit.  It is not their fault.  I know I would not like to be shot for being human.