October 25th 2014 - Last morning of BST

I've been up most of the morning it seems. Having woken up at 3.30am I struggled to get back to sleep, dozing on and off under the duckdown. Around 5am the birds began, robin first then a blackbird. As I lay there on what is the last day of BST 2014, I decided to get up and record the beginning of the day. 

 

I wasn't in the mood to don outdoor clothing and head off, rather sat in the office and stuck the recorder out the window. It took 45 minutes to obtain the attached 3 minutes of audio. Sound recording in a modern world has to be one of the most frustrating experiences at times. 6am and a constant stream of tractors, cars, vans and planes. Throughout all this anthropomorphic sound though, the birds kept singing.

 

A gentle reminder of the beginning of winter - click on Soundcloud link.

October 22nd 2014 - Jackdaws again from 2012

Yesterday I posted about my quest to discover where 'my' jackdaws went in my area of Somerset. But that was not the first time that I'd done this. For the last 5 years I've been to and from a small part of deepest darkest Wiltshire, sandwiched between Hampshire and Berkshire; a land bedecked with the feeling of emptiness. Yet it is a landscape awash with abundant wildlife including corvids, huge drifts of which blow and tumble like black snow across the landscape, especially in the winter months. 

Back in January 2012 I wrote about this http://wessexreiver.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/in-search-of-jackdaws.html

Today Jane a wildlife colleague of mine were discussing on-line my posting from yesterday. Why do jackdaw and rook flock together? Well it is a mystery, and as I said in 2012, I like a mystery, the natural world is all about mystery.

Research is on going, although the current thinking is two fold. Firstly rooks being the bigger of the two species are possibly acting as 'Big Brother' to the jackdaws; not in a reality TV sort of way you understand, more, looking after their smaller cousins.  Secondly, rooks posses sharp pointy bills with which they dig and probe the earth looking for worms and other invertebrates, something jackdaws couldn't do with any force. Thus the jackdaws could be following in the wake of the rook-like plough, much as seabirds will follow a tractor turning the furrow.

I like both theories. I like the fact that two species live and work as one unit. Not unique in nature, but something surprising. I have my own third theory. Given the intelligence of corvids, maybe, just maybe these two gregarious and flocking British corvids just like being with each other and are co-operating and communicating with each other in a way we'll never know. Whatever the reason, I'll keep watching and learning, and above all listening. For me, winter months mean bird spectacles, and like last night, tumbling black snow across a farmed landscape probably ranks above most things in my notebook.

Finally, to illustrate this posting, these two photos came from Jolle Jolles who is a jackdaw researcher at Cambridge University. The top image is us lot recording a living world on their work in 2011 for Radio 4, the latter is just one of the most evocative images I've ever seen of corvids. They're not my copyright nor for re-use elsewhere.

October 21st 2014 - Chasing Jackdaws (again)

 

In an earlier posting this month I mentioned the jackdaws which hurl themselves over the house at or around sunset as they head towards their roost. Currently this is around 5.50pm, today it was slightly earlier. It was a blustery day down here near the Somerset coast as ex-hurricane Gonzalo drifted over and battered the landscape along the Bristol Channel. Exciting weather which brought along with it the 30+mph gusts and bright sunshine. Managing to get home with sufficient daylight to go outside again I persuaded Julie to join me on a quick visit to the village to see where they go. And we found them immediately, along with rooks that jackdaws always forage with (more on that in another posting), in the damp pastures around the village. Skittish though they were in the breeze I managed to get close enough for a few 'grab the moment' images from a few hundred metres away.

 

 

 

The blustery wind made them quite restless tonight, however that restlessness was a sight to bring joy to any birdwatchers heart as they wheeled and dived on the blustery gusts overhead. I stood in the gathering gloom watching the associated pairs dive at speed before turning fully into the wind and rising into the sky at speed, much like avian fighter-interceptors. I love the way jackdaws live in pairs, within the social cohesion of the flock. Tonight these pairs were tumbling, rolling and diving wing tip to wing tip in a way that corvids do, at leisure in the sky around them. Such a fabulous way to end a stormy day as the red glow of a Welsh sunset carried over the English fields.  

October 11th 2014 - Blagdon, Somerset

I don't always have my camera with me. Which sometimes means images have to be taken with my Blackberry which isn't the best camera on the Planet. Yet a certain lack of clarity in an image is good, not least as this image is one I know rasonably well, but usually from the car, which affords just the briefest glimpse. Today after a coffee in the village of Blagdon a quick stretch of the legs allowed me to savour the view and listen to a while to the countryside at rest on a Saturday afternoon in October. Simple pleasures of the rural scene are the moment to savour in a busy life.

October 10th 2014 - Hopeless Jackdaws

 

Ohh I give up. Actually I don't, I just need to put more effort into this. Yesterday over the garden around 400 jackdaws wheeled and circled as they flew into their roost in the village, at around 6pm. I've been watching these birds come to roost all year, watching the few hundred dribble down to couples by mid April, then family pairs in the summer. By mid September the social cohesion which jackdaws enjoy saw these individual family groups noisily combine en route to the roost, then about 7pm. At 7am they noisily fly the other way from roost to their daytime foraging grounds. Sometimes at eye level past the bedroom window which overlooks the fields. Tonight I heard them, having the camera beside me I ventured into the garden. Tonight they drifted towards the sea, halfheartedly wafting about aimlessly en-route to the roost a good half a mile away. Hand held telephoto images are pointless, but it became a record shot of a Wessex Reiver standing in the garden trying and failing to capture a decent image for the record.  

 

Jackdaws (in fact all corvids but especially jackdaws and ravens) have enthralled me for years. Yet it was only a few years back that I began to really understand them after making a radio programme on cognitive behaviour. Jackdaws are almost unique in the animal world in that they have a pale eye, much like we have a pale eye and dark iris. The jackdaw eye is different to ours, yet the pale ring on its eye is now known to play a major part in their social interaction. Jackdaws indeed use their eyes to communicate fear, aggression, friendship and so on. Work is on going but the fascinating aspect of this to me is that these common, gregarious birds we live cheek by jowl with are supremely intelligent.

 

More information on this comes from the Cambridge Cognative Project especially this recent paper

 

http://www.wildcognitionresearch.com/files/Davidson-et-al_2014_gaze-sensitivity.pdf

That said, for me the joy is every night hearing the jak-a-jack calls coming from the south knowing they're on the move and about to fly over. I'm finding it difficult to photograph them at home so a trip to the roost seems the next logical step.

October 3rd 2014 - Great Tit and W Percival Westell

 

Working at home as I often do on a Friday brings with it many advantages. And of course many distractions to overcome. However today my ability to overcome this particular distracting great tit at the feeders was weak. It is a long time since I've used sunflower hearts at the feeders but the change in species has while not dramatic, been noticeable. Mixed seed, peanuts and fat balls are in constant supply here for the 40 or so house sparrows that make my garden (and roof eaves) home. Their antics are a joy to behold. However last weekend I decided to fill one of the feeders with sunflower hearts. Since then a number of blue and great tits have come back into the garden, providing a welcome (and much quieter) avian distraction.

 

 

It was lucky I had the camera to hand to snap that image of a sunflower pinching great tit. A moment caught forever. At this time I was taking a photograph of this book, bought for me by Julie yesterday from Great Bedwyn Post Office second hand stall. It is a great little book, well used it has to be said,  but it reminds me how far we have come in terms of identification aids. This reference works to British Butterflies and Moths by W. Percival Westell was first published around 1925 (I've failed to find an exact date) and I love books from that era. Simple black and white line drawings of the moths and butterflies he describes in summary detail, a far cry from the HD photographic images we can all access in 2014. Yet 90 years after publication these books are as valuable now as they were to the budding naturalist then. True some of the information has been superseded and updated, but these books provide a historical bedrock to what was happening in the British countryside between the wars, when the second wave of amateur naturalists swished butterfly nets across a meadow tall.

 

I'd heard of W Percival Westell but knew very little about him. So, after some internet research, I discovered that he was born in 1874 and was the first curator of the Letchworth and District Museum and Art Gallery in Letchworth, Britain's first Garden City. This Museum housed the artefacts of and was dedicated to the natural history of North Hertfordshire, including the famous Black Squirrel. Westell was appointed Honorary Curator in 1914 and remained there until his death in 1943. Whilst there he became a prolific author of nature works and in total wrote 84 books and gave over 100 radio talks on the BBC mostly covering the natural world.

 

For such a prolific author and naturalist there is very little information out there. I have though found his autobiography on-line from 1918;

 

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/69328#page/20/mode/1up

 

I feel a winter project coming on to discover more about this Letchworth naturalist. It is amazing what happens following a £2 book purchase.

October 2nd 2014

It felt strange last night not writing an entry on my blog. Not this blog, but my year long project blog, 365-2-50 which I completed on September 30th.

http://365-2-50.blogspot.co.uk/

I've enjoyed writing about my life over 365 days immensely, however it meant that my long term countryside blog, this one, Wessex Reiver has been neglected. I thought I'd like the rest after being forced to write every day yet as I supped a tea this image made me want to say something about it. Just leaves of course but the powerhouse of nature, providing energy through their chlorophyll after having converted it from sunlight. the tree from which they fell is host to a myriad of wildlife, in fact there was a late ladybird larva on the trunk. Now spent and fallen, the leaves once again provide nutrients as they decompose to recharge the ecosystem with a few goodies. And so, a long winded way of saying that I am returning to the Wessex Reiver and my love of the rural way of life, not just nature, but customs and anything of an idiosyncratic nature. My mind is interested in many things, but always returns to my passion and first love, the natural world.