Dear Readers, while I was in Milborne St Andrew in Dorset with my parents this week, I went out in search of autumn. It is my favourite season, with its lengthening shadows, golden light and occasional sun-blessed days. And being in the autumn of my own life I sometimes feel a certain restlessness, a kind of scratchy irritability and dissatisfaction. At times like these, I need to get out and walk, and tune in to something that’s outside my own head. Sometimes, it takes me a while to find what I’m looking for, to slow down enough to ‘see’ properly. But this time, I was pummeled into paying attention by creatures that were even more restless than I am.

House Martins are among the first birds to arrive in the UK from sub-Saharan Africa, and the last to leave. On this late August day, they seem deeply conflicted. One minute they land on the red-tiled roofs at the end of the village, and preen energetically. The next they fly up in a great flurry, circle the roof and land again. They resemble nothing so much as a shoal of little fishes, darting this way and that, directed by some imperative that is invisible to mere humans. The distinctive blue-black and white plumage of the adult birds reminds some people of orcas.

All the time, the House Martins call, a sound like a bagful of pebbles being shaken vigorously. This is an anxious time for them. For the newly fledged youngsters, it will be the first time that they’ve made their epic migratory journey. In a good year, House Martins will have two or three broods, and all those fledglings will accompany their parents on the trip south. What triggers this journey is probably a combination of the shortening day-length, falling temperatures and the decline in insect numbers. This last is vital: House Martins feed only on insects, catching them in mid-air. Without these birds, and others like them, our mosquito and midge problem would be much worse than it is.

Not everyone is delighted to have House Martins or Swallows or Swifts nesting under their eaves. The birds can be messy and noisy for the few months that they are rearing their young. Most people tolerate the inconvenience for the delight of seeing the birds soaring and barrel-rolling over their houses, and for the joy of their return every spring, for these birds are intensely faithful to their nest sites, and will re-use a nest if they can, patching it up with mud  if it’s been damaged by the winter weather. But for some people it’s a nuisance too far, and the nests are destroyed, or wire is used to deter the birds on their return. I can only imagine the confusion when, having braved desert, mountain, ocean and conurbation, the birds arrive at their destination only to find that their nest, lovingly built with over 1000 beakfuls of mud,  no longer exists. House Martins have declined significantly in the UK in the past few years, enough for the RSPB to put them on their Amber list of conservation concern. This may be down, in part, to the lack of suitable nest sites, as new houses and farm buildings often lack the overhanging eaves that are essential to create the nest. I’m sure that our addiction to pesticides will also not be helping with the food supply.

We know very little of what happens to House Martins once they reach their wintering grounds – of the 290,000 birds ringed in Britain and Ireland, only one has been recovered south of the Sahara. In fact, there is a theory that the birds spend the winter in the air, eating insects, and only come to earth in uninhabited forest regions to roost. This is not as unlikely as it sounds: while the breeding population of House Martins spends the hours of darkness on the nest, unmated birds are thought to roost on the wing at elevations of over 3300 feet. But wherever they go, there is a certain sadness in their leaving. By the time I left my parents to come back to London, most of the House Martins had gone. This is all to the good, of course – any bird that stayed in the UK would undoubtedly die of starvation.  We must make peace with their going, because we know that it is what they need to do. And, as in so much of life, the letting go is all.

Resources this week included Mark Cocker’s Birds Britannica, a wonderful guide to both the  facts and folklore of British birds.

Dear Readers, one of the sad things about my half mile territory is that it doesn’t contain any lakes, or indeed any ponds except for the one in my garden. So when the urge to seek out waterfowl takes over, I have to head for Hampstead Heath, which has a fine selection of water bodies (though whether they will be quite as grand when they’ve finished their controversial dam project is anybody’s guess). One of the most dapper and austere of the birds to be found here is the European Coot, a member of the rail family. It is an easy bird to identify, all sooty-black except for that white beak and frontal shield, and is probably most well known for being ‘as bald as a coot’. However, when you actually look at the creature, this doesn’t really make sense. It’s the front of their faces which are white, not the tops of their heads. I am indebted to the Hedgeland Tales website for pointing out that one of the Old English meanings of ‘bald’ was ‘streaked or marked with white’, and this makes much more sense. It may also be that the name of the Bald Eagle was referring to its whiteness, not its lack of hair. Or indeed feathers.

Most other rails, such as the Moorhen and Water Rail, are shy, retiring, good-mannered birds, tip-toeing around as if anxious not to offend. But one look at the glaring red eyes of the coot should tell you that this is a bird of passion. While all is mostly peaceful at this time of year, the Coot is not a bird to be messed with.

It doesn’t take much to upset a coot.You will often notice them laid out flat in the water, heading towards something on the other side of the pond like a small feathery torpedo. They are extremely territorial birds during the breeding season, and a pair will defend their little patch of water against all comers – dogs, humans, swans, ducks, but most especially other coots. An outbreak of explosive clucks and squawks heralds the onset of hostilities. They fight with wings, beaks, and with their enormous, fascinating feet.

Let’s take another look at those feet.

Whereas birds like ducks have full webbing between their toes, birds like coots have ‘partial webbing’, so there is an extended flap of skin surrounding each joint. This enables them to spread their body weight over floating vegetation and mud, and to improve their swimming speed. These are birds which are absolutely at home in the water, but much less so in the air – although the coot is better able to fly than, say, a moorhen, it still takes to the skies reluctantly, with much splashing and flapping. Many members of the family are totally flightless, which led to the extinction of some species once they encountered man and his long-time companions – rats, cats, dogs and pigs. One such is the Chatham Rail, wiped out in New Zealand by the end of the 19th Century.

The Eurasian Coot, however, is doing very well. It has a range which includes the whole of the Old World and Australasia. In the UK, the RSPB estimates that there are approximately 190,000 birds, with 31,000 breeding pairs. And, with a clutch size of up to ten eggs, and a propensity to produce 2 or 3 broods a year, you might think we would soon be wading through an ill-tempered sea of coots, pecking at our ankles and spoiling our shoe polish with their big flappy feet.

However, in the breeding season it seems that everything likes a mouthful of fluffy baby coot. Black-backed and Lesser Black-backed gulls are particularly partial. Pike and heron take a few. The babies drown themselves, get tangled up in angler’s paraphenalia and get themselves lost. But by far the biggest danger to little coots, I regret to say, is other coots. Adult birds will destroy eggs and kill chicks that get too close to their own brood. But unfortunately the sheer pressure of so many babies can also turn their own parents into furies. A chick which begs too much may be pecked on the head by its mother so often that it gives up and dies of starvation. Some may even be killed. Gradually, the brood reduces to a size that the parents can handle, and where there were ten baby coots, there may eventually be only one or two. And in the great scheme of things, this is probably just as well, though you would need a heart much harder than mine not to be upset at the sight of chicks being gradually reduced to hopelessness and eventual death.

In spite of all of this, however, I find coots fascinating birds. They are much more outgoing and confident than your average rail (when did you last see a Moorhen fighting a Black-headed Gull for a crust)? Their social dynamics are fascinating, and they have a kind of urban, bustling attitude which means that they punch well above their weight on the average boating lake. Our parks would not be the same without the clinks and plinks of coots arguing amongst themselves. Quieter, yes. But definitely not the same.

Dear Readers, have a look at the photograph above and see how many fledgling starlings you can count. This is one branch of my Hawthorn tree, and on Thursday this week it was a heaving, wheezing mass of babies. Every year, the youngsters emerge en masse and I am always touched that the parents bring them to my garden, though I suspect the neighbours are not so impressed with the noise and mess and general kerfuffle from dawn till dusk.

When they first leave the hollow tree that has been their home for the first few weeks of their lives, the fledglings seem wide-eyed with wonder. They follow their parents to the hawthorn tree, and sit there waiting for something to eat. While they wait, they investigate. The urge to peck anything that looks remotely edible reminds me of the way that human babies investigate everything mouth-first.

The fledglings spend a lot of time looking up hopefully, and wheezing every time an adult hoves into view. How the adults identify which baby is theirs is one of those mysteries of nature, but each youngster is as distinctive to his or her parents as our babies are to us.

The adults, strangely enough, seem rather relaxed. Do they know that the most frantic part of their job is over, and that soon their offspring will be independent? Or are they just exhausted and having a breather?

I have been in this house since the autumn of 2010, and every spring brings this flush of new life. I like to think that some of these birds are the youngsters of previous years, who are bringing their own fledglings to a reliable source of food. Feeding wild creatures is a big responsibility – although animals will find alternative sources of food if we suddenly stop providing for them, they are very vulnerable at times when they need extra supplies, such as now, or during a cold winter.  I always have some food on offer, but try to adjust the quantities according to need. An added incentive for year-round feeding is that starlings are a Red List species – according to the British Trust for Ornithology, their numbers have dropped by 80% nationally since the 1970’s. One reason for this is that fewer fledglings survive, possibly due to the difficulty in finding food during our drier summers, so I like to make sure that there is always some food available.

In a week or so, the fledglings will have learned to feed themselves, and will start to disperse. The frenetic pace in the garden will die down, and things will go back to normal. But for now, the hawthorn tree reverberates to the sound of hungry youngsters, and the starlings have left their ‘mark’ all over the garden furniture. My bird food budget is well and truly blown, and the man who delivers the suet pellets has probably developed a hernia from lifting all the heavy boxes. But there is something about this great burst of animal fertility that fills me with hope. In spite of everything that we are doing to mess things up, some things are still working.

Dear Readers, I like to think of myself as someone who is hopeful, but realistic. So, when I see those boards at the entrance to a nature reserve, describing all the wildlife that is lurking beyond the gate, I prepare myself for disappointment. Animals have a habit of moving around and not being where you expect to see them. Plants may not be in bloom, or may disappear completely. So whenever I’m told that there are nuthatches about, I breathe a long sigh. They are my nemesis. I have heard them many times. What I’ve never managed to do is to actually see them. So, when I was in Coldfall Wood last week and saw a small bird flash past and land in a tree down by the Everglades, I was not expecting him to stick around for some photographs. But, I was wrong!

Nuthatches are not uncommon birds – there are approximately 220,000 breeding couples in the UK, and they have a range from Portugal all the way to Japan. However, they are difficult to spot. You are much more likely to hear one – have a listen to the audio section on the RSPB page here. And one facet of their behaviour is unmistakable. Nuthatches are the only British birds that can run both up and down tree trunks – if you see a small bird hopping downwards, it’s a nuthatch.

Like Treecreepers and Woodpeckers , nuthatches forage beneath the bark of trees for their food, although they also eat seeds and, as you might expect, nuts. The bird jams an acorn or a hazelnut into a crevice in bark and bashes away at it with his ‘hatchet’-shaped bill. During the winter, the birds will cache nuts for use later on, and will hide them in plant-pots and window boxes, under stones, beneath bark and anywhere else that seems appropriate. Tests have shown that they can remember where they’ve left their caches for thirty days, which is impressive when I consider that some days I can barely remember where I’ve left my tube pass.

In the winter, nuthatches are another bird that might join a ‘feeding flock’ of finches or tits, but in the spring, the birds pair up for breeding.

Nuthatches are said to be monogamous, but, as in most things to do with the natural world, it ain’t that simple. A German study showed that ten percent of the chicks in the study area were fathered by a male who was not part of the ‘couple’, usually from an adjacent territory. Nuthatches are quite sedentary birds who need good quality woodland (which is increasingly short supply), and maybe the odd ‘illicit’ liaison helps to keep the gene-pool mixed up.

Nuthatches are yet another cavity nesting bird that lives in the wood – last week we talked about the Stock Doves that need hollow trees to nest, and when you add in the woodpeckers and the parakeets, it’s clear that the housing problem is about as acute as it is in the rest of London. However, having found a hole, nuthatches will make the entrance smaller if it’s too big, creating mortar from mud until way into the nest is a tight squeeze. The mud sets hard enough to deter even a woodpecker. Away from the nest, the nuthatch’s major predator is the sparrowhawk, that silent, round-winged killer of woodland birds. As usual, though, the major problem for nuthatches is the destruction of their habitat, another reason to be glad for the preservation of ancient woodland remnants like Coldfall.

Exploring Coldfall Wood reminds me of being in love. To start with, it was all about the obvious things – the scent of woodsmoke, the marsh marigolds, the parakeets squawking. But with every walk, I am noticing something different – the moods of the wood in rain and mist, the way the sounds change with the season, the arrival of some creatures and the departure of others.  Sometimes, the wood seems closed and unyielding, unwilling to share anything, and then I know that I have to be patient, and put in the time to really pay attention. At other times, the place seems abundant, full of wonders, with a new song bursting forth from every shrub, a new plant blooming under every tree. I never know what’s going to be happening when I set out, and I am starting to relax into the mystery of it all. Just as you never truly know another person, however long you live with them, so I will never know this few hectares of woodland. And that is the wonder of it .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, it is always worth checking out what at first glance may appear to be a Woodpigeon or a Feral Pigeon, because it may in fact be a Stock Dove, to my mind one of the prettiest of Britain’s native doves. There are a pair of them in Coldfall Wood at the moment, and I was delighted when I spotted them.

How can you tell that they are, in fact, Stock Doves? For a start, they do not have the characteristic white neck marks, or underwing flashes, of the Woodpigeon. Close to, you can also see that they have dark eyes which give them a gentle expression – Woodpigeons have a somewhat icy glare, and feral pigeons have red eyes. Furthermore, Stock Doves have a broken black line on their wings, and don’t have a white rump. What they do have is an iridescent patch of blue green on their necks.  Below is one of the illustrations from the Crossley ID Guide, which has been made freely available for us bird-loving bloggers ( a very generous gesture I feel).

Stock Doves are not rare (there are approximately 270,000 breeding pairs in the UK), but the UK has over 50% of the total European population, and so they are accorded Amber conservation status by the RSPB. This compares with over 5 million pairs of woodpigeons, and a million pairs of collared doves. They are undoubtedly under-recorded, and are generally rather shy, not allowing themselves to be approached as closely as the other members of the family.

The name ‘Stock Dove’ does not refer to their status as food birds (though they have been used as such), but from the old English name for a tree trunk, post or stump – Stocc. This is because they nest preferentially in hollow trees, although they have had to diversify since Dutch Elm Disease caused the demise of their favourite tree, and have been found nesting in everything from rabbit warrens to ivy-covered walls to church spires. All hollow trees are fiercely contested these days, with woodpeckers, parakeets and owls all fighting for the same nest holes. In ‘Birds Britannica’ Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey recount how this self-effacing bird has been known to

“…attack jackdaws, break the leg of or even kill a little owl, and scrap violently with neighbours”.

The Stock Dove may look cuddly but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of one. However, dead trees are generally allowed to stand in Coldfall Wood, and it may be that this pair have managed to stake out a suitable tree. I shall watch with interest to see if there are any juvenile birds later in the year.

The song of the Stock Dove is also rather more subtle than that of other pigeons: it reminds me a little of a long-jumper’s run up, or maybe a frog calling from the bottom of a well. It’s certainly a tentative sound, easily lost against the squawking of parakeets, the shouting of wrens and the calls of great tits.

Although the Stock Dove has historically been considered a country bird, in recent years it has been making increasing excursions into the suburbs and even central London. In the early spring, the birds gather in flocks to find food, and a group of over 1200 was counted in the Maple Cross area in 2009, followed by 912 birds in 2010. In ‘Birds of London’, Andrew Self remarks that these are ‘possibly the highest gatherings of these birds ever seen in the UK’. As agricultural land becomes an increasingly hostile environment for many creatures, maybe the ‘encapsulated countryside’ in our cities is becoming a safer, more welcoming option. I know that I never cease to be astonished by the sheer variety of the plants and animals that I find in my half mile territory.