We get small numbers of American birds, particularly in autumn, which I assume is caused by autumn gales. Famous is red eyed vireo, which weighs 17g. Of course, if they are seen, there is a stampede of birders, except not now.
... Probably quite unconnected, the last time I was on Iona, late 2019, there were some swans on a lochan close to where I stayed, and I was told that they had probably crossed the Atlantic on their way farther south, making a brief stop there.
Interesting if what you were told was true, but alas fairly unlikely. The west of Scotland is a favourite wintering place for Whooper Swans, but they will have come from Iceland. So that is a more likely bet.
We've three sorts of Swan in the UK. The common one is the Mute Swan, which is resident all year. Some of the Scottish islands have quite a lot of those and others very few. It is big. The Whooper is also big and comes in winter, mainly from Iceland. It is commoner in Scotland than southern England. The Bewick's is smaller and comes from Russia in winter mainly to a belt across the middle of England.
The Whooper and Bewick's both call in flight. The Mute doesn't but its wings make a singing sound.
Dashing out for a quick walk along the Wye river path between showers, I saw a Red Kite flying low over Hay Bridge. They're getting more common, but it's still a thrill to see that forked tail.
I once saw a hoopoe in winter in the UK. Seeing them in the summer is rare but not unknown. Seeing one in winter (February) was utterly bizarre.
Yes, very unusual. One of the birds from S. Europe and Africa, which doesn't show signs of breeding here. There is a whole swathe of birds which seem to be moving North, presumably, via climate change, e.g., little egret, cattle egret, great white egret, glossy ibis, spoonbill. Unfortunately we are losing a large number such as nightingale, curlew, turtle dove.
I knew of three turtle dove nests locally, used to hear them, one because I used to go and listen to the lovely noise at the local nature reserve, the others on my cycle commute, but haven't heard them for a decade or so.
The other red list bird I saw/heard at the same time, the yellow hammer, is still around.
The most bizarre thing I heard cycling was a night jar, right terrain, time of year and day.
(We saw and heard a great spotted woodpecker on Sunday, very clearly, not still long enough for me to photograph though, unlike a recent red kite and kestrel we got near.
Most of the Pine Siskins seem to have moved back north. Our back yard is now reverting to "normal". Yesterday I saw Chickadees and a Bewicks Wren. Today there was a Varied Thrush, which we only see when there is a lot of snow up in the hills. They are really beautiful.
Oh gosh. You can have ALL my turtle doves (okay, leave me a pair). They are everywhere in the spring, making that freaky noise and building messy nests.
A few Sundays mornings ago I was walking to the studio, across a major bridge over our principal river. (Toronto is built on a series river and creeks, and is riven with ravines, so there's a lot of wildlife just out of sight.) I though, My God, that dog's going to get hit! as something crossed the somewhat busy street. Then I realised that it too low-slung to be a dog - it was a fox! S/he made it across with alacrity.
What's the status of foxes in Canada please? Here they were introduced in the early days of European occupation and they flourished. Over time, they've eradicated several indigenous species and shooting them is encouraged.
Sorry for the delay. I'm not certain what you mean precisely by "status". The fox is endemic to Canada. There are four (I think) varieties. The swift fox (Alberta, Saskatchewan) has almost disappeared. The grey fox is disappearing, but for no clear cause, so far as I know. It has protected status. The fox that I saw was a red fox (which, despite the name, can have quite a range of hues), and is flourishing, as it's highly adaptable to human encroachment. So too the arctic fox. The arctic fox's main problem is its excellent pelt - beautiful and extremely warm, so rather prized. My understanding is that the arctic fox population is stable.
Toronto, as a city, has a surprising range of wildlife because of the ravines which have been left semi-wild. Of course there are the migratory birds, but also falcons, hawks, foxes (q.v.), coyotes, racoons, deer. Thanks to climate change, last summer I saw a opossum.
Racoons are a sort of quadruped joke in Toronto, to the point that it appears in Porter Airlines' advertisements and other art, courtesy of Tyler Brulé. Our urban racoons are about 50% larger than those in the wild because food is so plentiful for them. Years ago the city introduced new containers for compostable collection. The racoons figured out how to open the putatively racoon-proof latch. We have new containers with a sort of dial lock. I'm certain that the racoon braintrust is at work in their own Bletchley Park. They are utterly fearless and contemptuous of humanity.
I started recording birds within a five mile radius of my house last June, and have now seen forty. This might still go up, because I haven't seen a red kite or waxwings this year, although I have seen them locally previously. I am lucky because I have a river, farmland, woodland and a small area of marsh within the five mile radius.
Red-list birds included yellow hammers, which are plentiful, fieldfares which are regular winter visitors and a linnet, which was a first for me, and a real thrill. Other highlights included spotting a dipper, which I'd seen downriver before, but not here, reed buntings and a kingfisher.
The NZ equivalent of your racoons would be the Kea, which are the Alpine Parrots. Kea will strip the rubber from around the windows in cars, unlace trampers' packs or boots left outside, or sneak into a shop and steal the chocolate bars. But one of their best tricks is to move orange road cones forcing traffic to travel in unexpected ways. There is a tunnel on the road to Milford Sound that regularly has avalanches during winter, so cones are stored just inside the entrance in case they are needed to warn motorists. To distract the kea from moving the cones out of the tunnels and to give them something else to do Transit NZ has built a kea playground beside the road.
Kea are one of the most intelligent birds in the world - definitely more intelligent that the people I saw feeding them harmful food in the middle of a busy parking area.
Kea are one of the most intelligent birds in the world
A person I know, when a teenager, visited some caves with a friend, riding their bikes to get there. When they emerged, the leather saddles of both bikes had been completely eaten by kea, so they had an awkward and uncomfortable ride home.
Red-list birds included yellow hammers, which are plentiful, fieldfares which are regular winter visitors and a linnet, which was a first for me, and a real thrill. Other highlights included spotting a dipper, which I'd seen downriver before, but not here, reed buntings and a kingfisher.
I keep an eye on a local lake for one of the local birders and, TBH, I've almost given up - partly because I tend to visit the allotment now in what is really work time as I pass it between the lab and the "home office" (quite why visiting the lake is taking the mick more than visiting the allotment in that time I'm not sure, it just feels as though it is) as there's so rarely anything interesting there - I've seen nothing out of the ordinary since the kingfisher on New Year's Eve. It used to regularly have wigeon in the winter, alongside teal and shoveller (well worth watching those feed), but now they hardly seem to visit. I suspect I'd notice more on the allotment if I had more time when I visit - linnet are common and there used to be reed buntings, but you do need to look as they can be confused with sparrows at a glance. Many years ago I put up a snipe in the gloaming out there, I wondered what the hell the noise was (look up snipe drumming)!
On the other hand with spending more time at home we've been able to watch the birds in the garden - I now have three nestboxes up, and have been promised an old ballcock that I can cut up and use as a mould for a house martin nest that will go under the eaves over a flat roof where they can drop crap to their heart's content. We must surely have a thrush as we have an ever-increasing pile of snail shells, but have yet to see it. Further out in the fields - which we've currently decided are out of bounds as the paths are like the Somme - we often see yellowhammer in flocks, a real treat as I hadn't seen them in decades, and over in the organic fields no doubt before long the larks will be soaring skyward. They were a real joy in lockdown the first. There's also ravens - right on the edge of the Oxford conurbation, I do wonder if they have a fondness for spilled kebab? Coming across one of those unexpectedly after a few shandies would be a shock!
No sign of dipper - I suspect rockier rivers are preferred and the only otter we've seen was very, very dead on the side of the A40. Ho hum.
Hopefully if there's a gap in the glum weather we'll get a chance to go over to Middleton Stoney (it's close enough that it should count as fair exercise), and see the snowdrops in the roadside hedges this weekend - I've rarely seen so many in one place. Right, speaking of the home office, I should be working...
@Sandemaniac if you're near Oxford, Kites should also be common and you should get Buzzards as well as Ravens. If it's near enough to count as 'in the area', not closed off completely and not too muddy, do you know Otmoor? There are also almost certainly Muntjac about.
A friend and neighbour had one in her garden a year or two ago, a very urban location, but the normal deer round here are Roes.
That puts you in the south west, where I grew up, with roe deer. Here it's fallow and muntjac, which I do see, and their evidence. They love giant hogweed and you can see which has eaten it from the height of the remains. Really noticeable bark damage on trees in the forest recently, particularly holly trees.
Muntjac seem to get everywhere. I see them on arable land in Norfolk, I suppose there are always copses where they can hide. And of course, they get into gardens. Spell check changed copses to corpses! Called spinneys in E. Anglia, meaning a place for game birds, I think.
@Enoch, yes we know Otmoor The maternal Knotweed's annual birthday gift to @Sandemaniac is RSPB membership, so we wander down there from time to time. I've managed to spend time having a screenbreak this week by looking out at the red kites circling over the way. Buzzards show up less often, and the local jackdaws tend to mob both kites and buzzards whenever they feel like being rowdy.
We definitely have muntjac - in the summer we saw one chase off a bull-terrier in the wheat fields, we suspect there was a young one nearby being protected. There are also roe deer grazing nearby. One night 2 or 3 years ago I was driving home and ended up following a roe down one of the roads we live on (we're on a corner). I'd startled it where it was grazing on a wide bit of verge, and the direct route to the fields is that road, followed by a footpath. It startled me because the road in question is lined with houses on both sides!
The NZ equivalent of your racoons would be the Kea, which are the Alpine Parrots. Kea will strip the rubber from around the windows in cars, unlace trampers' packs or boots left outside, or sneak into a shop and steal the chocolate bars. But one of their best tricks is to move orange road cones forcing traffic to travel in unexpected ways. There is a tunnel on the road to Milford Sound that regularly has avalanches during winter, so cones are stored just inside the entrance in case they are needed to warn motorists. To distract the kea from moving the cones out of the tunnels and to give them something else to do Transit NZ has built a kea playground beside the road.
Kea are one of the most intelligent birds in the world - definitely more intelligent that the people I saw feeding them harmful food in the middle of a busy parking area.
I love kea, though I'm sure I love them more for being safely far away from me. Not so the possums and raccoons!
Today saw the last of the ( large orange something ) fish carted off to the bin. Leaving the way clear for our frogspawn to thrive, rather than being annually hoovered up.
Speaking of eagles, our fuzzballs are almost a month old and huge!
Harriet must be feeling in a decorative mood; she's enhanced the nest with a pineapple air plant.
Muntjac occasionally wander into our garden in Cambridge, despite there now being a large housing estate between us and fields (our house used to back on to farmer’s fields and I guess they are creatures of habit).
My identification of lesser spotted woodpeckers by sound was right. I met someone with a huge telephoto lens in the Forest earlier in the week and asked what he was photographing He was out to see if he could catch an adder again, having seen one on Sunday. But he had photographed the lesser spotted woodpecker in January when I was pretty sure I'd heard it.
Always good to have things confirmed! I think our wildlife is having an away day - possibly related to the fact that I've been re-purposing pallets with a percussion adjuster...
The farmer took the lynx out into the forest some distance away from the farm and released it. He let it have the dead chickens.
That was I couldn't help thinking that when he showed the lynx the, er, battlefield, the lynx was thinking, "Gimme back my dinner, yum yum." Sort of counterproductive.
Had a new bird in my garden the last few days, a long tailed tit.
Only one? I don't think I've ever seen them in bunches of less than 3 or 4! A small flock regularly visit the parental Knotweed's back garden feeders, and are great fun to watch as they bounce around in the trees. I'm rather fond of them
Had a new bird in my garden the last few days, a long tailed tit.
Only one? I don't think I've ever seen them in bunches of less than 3 or 4! A small flock regularly visit the parental Knotweed's back garden feeders, and are great fun to watch as they bounce around in the trees. I'm rather fond of them
One of the best experiences of the first lockdown was hearing skylarks in the field next to the motorway, which was so quiet and unused. And hearing them all go quiet as a peregrine flew over. Lark song was also one of the things that made cycling to work through local farmland farmed for diversity a delight.
And a peregrine is what I'm pretty sure I saw this morning over the Forest - flying past. There is a local nest. We also have buzzards and kites, sparrowhawks and kestrels locally, but this was none of those.
Oh, I've stopped hearing bats without a detector since I got interested in them, along with shop mosquitos, thankfully, but not until I was into my 50s. And more recently the top notes of goldcrests, but can still hear long-tailed tits.
Some shops have something called a mosquito, a broadcast of a high pitched buzz at a sound pitched to be painful for teenagers but not adults to move on said teenagers. But women hear higher longer so quite a few of us are affected too. Link to Wikipedia
I forgot grasshoppers and crickets, last couple of years, lost grasshoppers.
Today's joy, other than the Greater Spotted Woodpecker, very close, but I couldn't spot it, were the pair of very irritated jays, which I not only saw but also their obvious nest.
Comments
We've three sorts of Swan in the UK. The common one is the Mute Swan, which is resident all year. Some of the Scottish islands have quite a lot of those and others very few. It is big. The Whooper is also big and comes in winter, mainly from Iceland. It is commoner in Scotland than southern England. The Bewick's is smaller and comes from Russia in winter mainly to a belt across the middle of England.
The Whooper and Bewick's both call in flight. The Mute doesn't but its wings make a singing sound.
Yes, very unusual. One of the birds from S. Europe and Africa, which doesn't show signs of breeding here. There is a whole swathe of birds which seem to be moving North, presumably, via climate change, e.g., little egret, cattle egret, great white egret, glossy ibis, spoonbill. Unfortunately we are losing a large number such as nightingale, curlew, turtle dove.
The other red list bird I saw/heard at the same time, the yellow hammer, is still around.
The most bizarre thing I heard cycling was a night jar, right terrain, time of year and day.
(We saw and heard a great spotted woodpecker on Sunday, very clearly, not still long enough for me to photograph though, unlike a recent red kite and kestrel we got near.
Varied Thrush, which we only see when there is a lot of snow up in the hills. They are really beautiful.
Sorry for the delay. I'm not certain what you mean precisely by "status". The fox is endemic to Canada. There are four (I think) varieties. The swift fox (Alberta, Saskatchewan) has almost disappeared. The grey fox is disappearing, but for no clear cause, so far as I know. It has protected status. The fox that I saw was a red fox (which, despite the name, can have quite a range of hues), and is flourishing, as it's highly adaptable to human encroachment. So too the arctic fox. The arctic fox's main problem is its excellent pelt - beautiful and extremely warm, so rather prized. My understanding is that the arctic fox population is stable.
Toronto, as a city, has a surprising range of wildlife because of the ravines which have been left semi-wild. Of course there are the migratory birds, but also falcons, hawks, foxes (q.v.), coyotes, racoons, deer. Thanks to climate change, last summer I saw a opossum.
Racoons are a sort of quadruped joke in Toronto, to the point that it appears in Porter Airlines' advertisements and other art, courtesy of Tyler Brulé. Our urban racoons are about 50% larger than those in the wild because food is so plentiful for them. Years ago the city introduced new containers for compostable collection. The racoons figured out how to open the putatively racoon-proof latch. We have new containers with a sort of dial lock. I'm certain that the racoon braintrust is at work in their own Bletchley Park. They are utterly fearless and contemptuous of humanity.
Red-list birds included yellow hammers, which are plentiful, fieldfares which are regular winter visitors and a linnet, which was a first for me, and a real thrill. Other highlights included spotting a dipper, which I'd seen downriver before, but not here, reed buntings and a kingfisher.
Kea are one of the most intelligent birds in the world - definitely more intelligent that the people I saw feeding them harmful food in the middle of a busy parking area.
Huia - Possums are pretty much as bad. They'll damage almost anything.
I keep an eye on a local lake for one of the local birders and, TBH, I've almost given up - partly because I tend to visit the allotment now in what is really work time as I pass it between the lab and the "home office" (quite why visiting the lake is taking the mick more than visiting the allotment in that time I'm not sure, it just feels as though it is) as there's so rarely anything interesting there - I've seen nothing out of the ordinary since the kingfisher on New Year's Eve. It used to regularly have wigeon in the winter, alongside teal and shoveller (well worth watching those feed), but now they hardly seem to visit. I suspect I'd notice more on the allotment if I had more time when I visit - linnet are common and there used to be reed buntings, but you do need to look as they can be confused with sparrows at a glance. Many years ago I put up a snipe in the gloaming out there, I wondered what the hell the noise was (look up snipe drumming)!
On the other hand with spending more time at home we've been able to watch the birds in the garden - I now have three nestboxes up, and have been promised an old ballcock that I can cut up and use as a mould for a house martin nest that will go under the eaves over a flat roof where they can drop crap to their heart's content. We must surely have a thrush as we have an ever-increasing pile of snail shells, but have yet to see it. Further out in the fields - which we've currently decided are out of bounds as the paths are like the Somme - we often see yellowhammer in flocks, a real treat as I hadn't seen them in decades, and over in the organic fields no doubt before long the larks will be soaring skyward. They were a real joy in lockdown the first. There's also ravens - right on the edge of the Oxford conurbation, I do wonder if they have a fondness for spilled kebab? Coming across one of those unexpectedly after a few shandies would be a shock!
No sign of dipper - I suspect rockier rivers are preferred and the only otter we've seen was very, very dead on the side of the A40. Ho hum.
Hopefully if there's a gap in the glum weather we'll get a chance to go over to Middleton Stoney (it's close enough that it should count as fair exercise), and see the snowdrops in the roadside hedges this weekend - I've rarely seen so many in one place. Right, speaking of the home office, I should be working...
A friend and neighbour had one in her garden a year or two ago, a very urban location, but the normal deer round here are Roes.
We definitely have muntjac - in the summer we saw one chase off a bull-terrier in the wheat fields, we suspect there was a young one nearby being protected. There are also roe deer grazing nearby. One night 2 or 3 years ago I was driving home and ended up following a roe down one of the roads we live on (we're on a corner). I'd startled it where it was grazing on a wide bit of verge, and the direct route to the fields is that road, followed by a footpath. It startled me because the road in question is lined with houses on both sides!
I love kea, though I'm sure I love them more for being safely far away from me. Not so the possums and raccoons!
Looking forward to a garden full of frogs!
Harriet must be feeling in a decorative mood; she's enhanced the nest with a pineapple air plant.
I saw a reed bunting at the local lake yesterday.
The farmer took the lynx out into the forest some distance away from the farm and released it. He let it have the dead chickens.
That was
Only one? I don't think I've ever seen them in bunches of less than 3 or 4! A small flock regularly visit the parental Knotweed's back garden feeders, and are great fun to watch as they bounce around in the trees. I'm rather fond of them
Yes, only one.
Sadly, I've only ever heard a skylark once, many years ago. But I still remember what a magical sound it made.
And a peregrine is what I'm pretty sure I saw this morning over the Forest - flying past. There is a local nest. We also have buzzards and kites, sparrowhawks and kestrels locally, but this was none of those.
I forgot grasshoppers and crickets, last couple of years, lost grasshoppers.