rspb big garden birdwatch this weekend!

you can register here
and download your recording sheet here

i took part for the first time last year and would definitely recommend it - if nothing else, look upon it as a guilt free way to spend an hour with a cuppa, watching the birds in your garden (don't forget to count them too!) and the results you collect will help the rspb protect our garden birds in years to come.

beware though - if the birds in your garden know what you're up to, they seem to disappear for the hour you are recording!  no, seriously.  i had read about this before, but i can assure you that the garden is usually hopping and flapping and cheeping and chirping like crazy, but for the hour i was recording last year it was almost eerily quiet :)

i really encourage you to take an hour out of your day to take part, you won't regret it.

a roman day out

a bit of nicer weather (before the snow came back recently!) encouraged us to go out roman hunting the other day! in an archaeology type way, no violent past-times here!

we really do live in a fantastic part of the country, so much to see and do and learn.

so, we headed off to look at roman forts along the gask ridge and here's what we saw ...

lovely straight roman roads to walk along!

muir o'fauld watch-tower

another lovely path leading to ardunie watch-tower

then on to kirkhill

with lots of lovely foresty stuff along the way

this looked like an archway into a secret world (well, to me anyway, perhaps i'd had too much fresh air at this point!)

lovely, lovely, soft willow

and more time to stop and stare at mushrooms

in amongst all this we also managed some bird-watching and saw yellowhammer for the first time! along with: starling; fieldfare; rooks and jackdaws and chaffinches a-plenty all avoiding the buzzards circling overhead.

after lots of fun and fresh air we headed home to a fantastically warming, tasty tea of leek and potato gratin (with added quorn, what a lovely day :)

Stop the Corvid Cull

I was horrified to learn of this proposed cull from http://www.thecorvidjournal.blogspot.com. Corvids are a particular favourite of mine and the more I learn about them and study them in action, the more I realise they are totally undeserving of the reputation they have wrongly been given. They are intelligent, beautiful creatures. This does not mean however that I value them over songbirds – I see past the hype and value them equally, who are we to decide which species should live and which should die – isn’t that what nature is supposed to do?!

Plus, I’m really uncomfortable about the level of hypocrisy over matters like this – there are stats from the Mammal Society, which estimate that UK cats catch up to 275 million prey items a year, of which 55 million are birds, and I don’t see anyone calling for a cull of domestic cats! Please don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not advocating a moggy-cull, merely using this as an example.

And then, when you look further into it, you learn that the group calling for the cull has strong connections with the shooting ‘industry’, and the group backing the cull also has connections with the same.

Anyway, enough ranting from me, you can find more information, from animalaid with details of how you can help oppose this senseless cull.

“The Songbird Survival Trust - several of whose most prominent figures own shoots or have strong shooting connections - has called for a cull on corvids (magpies, crows, jackdaws etc). This is despite there being evidence that these birds do not cause the deaths of songbirds as the Trust claims. It is reasonable to conclude that the group’s close connection to the shooting industry lies behind its cull plans given that shooters blame corvids for eating pheasant chicks and the feed intended for ‘game’ birds.

The group’s dubious motives were exposed in The Sunday Times on February 6th. Nick Forde, the Trust’s principle spokesman could not identify any of the three most endangered songbirds, despite claiming to be passionate about them. He had no trouble, however, identifying a pheasant.

The corvid cull is backed by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), which also boasts a number of leading figures who shoot or profit from shooting. Read the article in The Telegraph.

How can I help?
= Sign this: petition
= Write to Defra to oppose the cull:
Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Nobel House, 17 Smith Square, London SW1P 3JR
= Contact the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust on 020 7290 0110
 or email (london@gwct.org.uk) to politely voice your objection.
= Attend the demonstration outside the GWCT’s office in London:
Meet: 12pm, Saturday 19th February
Contact on the day: Paul
Tel number on the day: 0799 981 2994
Address: 26 Mortimer St, W1W 7RB

birdwatch

well, it's been a busy old time here, so i'm only just getting round to posting my numbers from the rspb birdwatch (i blogged about it here) ...

10 woodpigeon
7 chaffinch
4 blackbirds
3 house sparrows
1 robin
1 blue tit
1 magpie
1 dunnock

it was a shame that the coal tits, great tits and collared doves didn't put in an appearance, and the numbers did seem a little low, but as i was reading on shirl's gardenwatch blog it seems like there may be a conspiracy by our feathered friends to 'hide' when they know a census is being taken.

i thought that i might do this once a month to see how the seasons affect the types and number of birds that visit our little patch, it really was a lovely way to spend an hour :)

the birds

the hungry birds ...
as well as the usual mix of garden birds that have been enjoying our home-made bird cake, apple, seed, and fruit mix, it seems that the gulls have found us! i think they may have come from the harbour and are possibly having to come further and further to find food. the pigeons did seem a little put out by them though!

grabbing as much as they can before the gulls return

when we first moved here, five years ago, there weren't any magpies in the area but just recently i've seen a few flying around. given that corvids are a bit of an obsession of mine (encouraged by reading esther woolfson's, corvus: a life with birds), i've been delighted to see the magpie starting to get braver and take some food from our temporary feeding spot (out of the way of the neighbour's cats), we even had two the other morning - cue not a lot getting done, other than me gazing out of the window at the myriad clouds of birds coming and going, and changing throughout the day.


if i go reeeally quietly, they might not notice me ...
the grab and run approach

bird cake!

as in a cake for the birds, not a cake made from birds!

well, it might not look too appetising to me but our feathered friends have been scoffing this as fast as i can make it. we've still got a load of snow and ice (will it ever go away?) so as well as our usual seed-feeder, i've started putting food out for the birds twice a day.

as i wasn't really baking this year (m went mad in the grocery store and bought enough sweets, choccies, crisps, snacks, cakes, pies to last a lifetime) i thought i would use up all of the dried fruit, the nuts, the suet that i wouldn't be using. i also found some pinhead oatmeal and some muesli i didn't really like very much and added some bird seed. it all got chopped up, then i melted some vegetable suet in the microwave, poured it over the dry mix and hey-presto! this gets chopped into smaller chunks and put out with some seed and chopped apples mixed in.

we've gone from a few birds visiting the feeder to a veritable flock who wait for us in the tree when we go out now. the binoculars now have a permanent home on the window-sill, as much to be on the look-out for next-door's cats as to enjoy watching the birds.

white cottage soundscape

i've never uploaded video to my blog before, so hopefully this'll work ... this is a wee video clip that m made as we were leaving the cottage in peebles, as a momento of our idyllic week, hopefully you have the speakers turned up so you can hear the wonderful sounds.

officially a grand weekend :)

well thankfully we had a break in the clouds this weekend and managed to make the most of the blue skies and sunshine during the day and the clear skies of the evening.

we went for a hike into the hills and woods not far from home and had a glorious day! we spotted: deer; great tits; blue tits; coal tits; long tailed tits; buzzards soaring overhead, one or two being mobbed by rooks; something that looked like a pied flycatcher but moved too quickly for a proper identification and great swathes of snowdrops; and rather bizarrely a passenger plane which looked like it was being tailed by three fighter jets?!

then the following evening, m persuaded me out into the chilly night for some astro-photography (not sure if that's the proper term but that's what we're calling it!). we were dressed in so many layers we looked like michelin men to try and keep the cold at bay. but we got some amazing pics from the top of a hill close-by.

it was also great to play around with the camera and get some good results for a change! i've never been entirely converted to digital and still love my old manual slr and have happy memories of hours spent in the darkroom - somehow this new fangled digitary nonsense isn't quite the same. having said that, it is great to be able to see the results immediately. and we got some pretty good pics of the night sky, although my knowledge of the constellations doesn't extend much beyond orion's belt and the big dipper these days - must brush up on the night sky :)

on our way home we crossed a bridge over the dual carriageway so stopped to play around with the shutter speed some more ...

our first snowdrops

spring is on the way, spring is on the way (although waking up to more snowy scenes yesterday you wouldn't have thought so!).

m finished his set of shifts the other morning so i picked him up at 8am laden with binoculars, bird book and picnic! what a glorious morning we had, we headed onto a little island on the tay (right in the middle of perth) and saw: deer; a seal; goldeneye; heron; goosander (a first for us!); cormorant; goldcrest; blue tit; chaffinch; goldfinch; a massive flock of domestic white geese and a few birds we weren't quite sure about because they wouldn't stay still long enough! and we also saw our first snowdrops of the year :)

then we sat on a fallen tree to enjoy our picnic, aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh what a blissful way to start the day :)