Natural Suffolk

red-breasted merganser at Mistley

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:51:00 +0000

Well, it's common, but I don't see them every day. Photo could be better, was not really melding with the 400 lens today

This flock of pintail were nice

Minsmere Konik Pony

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Visited Minsmere after a bit of a break. It was raining the sort of light but determined drizzle that eventually soaks through, but at times it seemed like I had the reserve to myself. Good for ducks, teal, wigeon, shelduck. The wind was down and the sounds were classic winter Minsmere, with some of the Lapwing calling and the babbling almoust laughing sound of shelduck in the distance. A bit of a surprise to see the horses out in the rain, the above specimen feeding with about five others near South Hide.

Shoveler

I don't normally do ducks, but today is the weather for them, and even I can call these ones, due to their massive bills.

Little Egret

A Little Egret added a dash of brightness - they're becoming two a penny down here but you still have to admire such a handsome bird.

RSPB Lakenheath

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:15:00 +0000

Saw this snail hanging on a piece of grass - quite colourful for a snail. Scored lucky on the Cranes - got here a bit late (9am). Worked slowly along to the end via the path near the railway line. Lots of whitethroats, marsh warblers, the odd sedge, several reed buntings and finally got to the crane watchpoint about 11. Saw a hobby hunting, and good views of a marsh harrier. About 11:30 the cranes took off near the corugated iron hut about a mile away, rose majestically in the air, did one loop and then descended into the reeds again.

Fritillary

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:47:00 +0000

at SWT St Martin's Wood.

Bats - pipistrelle social calls

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:05:00 +0000

searching - third sound is a social call. Thanks to David from the Bat Conservation Trust forum for educating me as to what the strange call was

Bats

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 12:17:00 +0000

They're too high for us to hear normally, so this recording is slowed 10x to become audible

Homing in and taking out an insect

Orange Tip

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 11:06:00 +0000

Orange Tip butterfly, Bradfield Woods. Reasonably co-operative to being photographed, unlike the cabbage whites. I haven't yet got close enough to one of them for a shot

Purple Orchid

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:51:00 +0000

Handsome purple orchid growing in Bradfield woods

Oxlips

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:45:00 +0000

Bit ho-hum for me - too pastel yellow for my taste. I prefer the orchid in Bradfield woods but apparently these are concentrated in the Bradfield woods area and of national importance according to the Suffolk Wildlife trust.

7-spot ladybird

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:05:00 +0000

A bog-standard 7 spot ladybird Cocinella 7-punctata (thanks to A Pocket Guide to the Ladybirds of Britain & Ireland) Digital cameras aren't so good on red, to my eyes this has drifted orangey compared to what it looked like in the field, despite white balanced locked on direct sun

Treecreeper

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:31:00 +0000

Treecreeper working its way up a silver birch at Barham with the morning sun on his back

Italian Sparrow

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 23:27:00 +0000

this Italian cock sparrow is rather fine

chatty lot too -

The Italian sparrow Passer domesticus italiae is charged with being a hybrid between the Spanish sparrow and the House Sparrow we know and love (in Europe, OK!). They sound pretty much like the house sparrows I am used to, but in Lugano, Switzerland, the sparrows are much bolder than the timid house sparrows I know at home

later on, with a Lugano church bell at the end

Innocent Days

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 23:32:00 +0000

The air is not yet crisp and cold but you can feel the changings of the seasons. These are innocent days for the new birds of the year like this freshly minted Starling

and this Sparrow yet to moult.

They have the innocence of youth knowing only of a world which has grown kinder and more abundant. They are not yet wise to the shortening of the days and the privations of Winter. Four out of five will fall to the forest floor, not destined to see another summer day.

Insects time stretched

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 23:40:00 +0000

This patch of unpromising looking waste ground next to a main road hosted a number of crickets – probably bush crickets by the sound through the bat detector compared with some on the web, but heck, what do I know, they could be something else.
Anyway, lots of these guys, and they sound a lot better to me reconverted and time-stretched

6x time stretched 5.3Mb mp3

than the original recording which sounds like mush to me

Original Heterodyne recording 2Mb mp3

Once again, detail seems clearer in the time stretched recording. The tone colour and character of the time stretched recording is much more recognisable as related to the audible sound, recorded with a standard MKE300 microphone (with traffic noise and people – this was a busy road)

Audible sound of the crickets heard in the bat detector 0.5Mb mp3

Electret paralleling experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 23:47:00 +0000

Rapid Electronics’ 35-0190 electret mic insert is cheap enough to muck around with. Rumour has it paralleling these guys up is worth doing for extra sensitivity and noise reduction, so it seemed worth a go.

Schematic

Listen to the results, test signal provided by a bunch of gormless teens playing in the rec and some friendly sparrows. The right-hand channel is the paralleled set

Bunch of gormless teenagers and friendly sparrows 240kb mp3

Rightmark shows a 2.5dB improvement in signal level from the doubled up pair
It doesn’t pay to pull this trick directly off plug-in-power on a Sony MZ-NH700

friendly sparrows 240kb mp3

as the PIP hasn’t got enough grunt to power the paralleled pair. I measured 1.1V across the singleton and 0.24V across the pair, which isn’t enough to power the capsules, operating voltage range 1.5V to 10V. In fact the singleton wasn’t really in spec on PIP.
With the 6k8 resistors the corresponding voltages were 6.9V, 4.9V from an 8.2V onload battery voltage

Rightmark shows the corresponding drop in output

Nightjar churring over the heath

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:14:00 +0000

Challenging beasts to get a photo of – unusually for birds they see better in the dark than we do. I located this with a Telinga parabolic dish and then managed to line up a video cam on it set to frame-averaging night mode. They seem to be doing well on Blaxhall heath this year – there seemed to be about five individuals audible simultaneously within Telinga range.

video

Swallow sound

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 23:11:00 +0000

When one of these guys perches on the wire outside your dorm room you have to fire off a few pics – not often you get eye level with a swallow!
Nice sound too. What’s that cockerel doing going off at the end – it’s noon!

Blackbird begging sound

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Wed, 24 May 2006 23:09:00 +0000

Apparently you only get this sound from a blackbird as a fledgeling. It is loud – this recording in picked from a 20minute segment of intermittent begging. Yet again the blackbird seems to be inviting the neighbourhood cats to come and get it!

sound

Starling Noise

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Wed, 17 May 2006 23:05:00 +0000

You want to avoid feeding birds in a way starlings can get at it too easily this time of year.

Otherwise you get this noise, which gets a bit much. The 1min clip starts of with the friendly chirp of a sparrow, before quickly descending into a starling-fest. Starlings are communal birds that synchronise their single breeding attempt. Which means all their chicks come out at about the same time and beg for food, and the adults bring the chicks to a good food source. Don’t be that source if you don’t want to hear this…

The Last Chirp

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Tue, 09 May 2006 22:58:00 +0000

Across the land, particularly in urban areas, the chirping of sparrows falls silent in the concrete canyons of our cities, and indeed the great cities of Northern Europe [1 , 2 ]. Something is doing for our house sparrows, and we don’t know exactly what it is.
tribulations of science in the city – the difficulty of isolating the variables in urban habitat changes
what’s up
Kate Vincent has studied the sparrows’ plight and her PhD thesis shows that later broods are dying in the nest from a lack of insect food.
It is difficult to establish, however, what this is due to. The House sparrow, as its name indicates, is closely dependent on the human environment, it may be that changes in the built environment are what is making food scarcer. This would tally with the observation that the percentage decline is highest in large urban areas such as London, and less on farmland and towns.
the why
It may be that something else is reducing the number of insects in the urban environment. Or that the number of insects is the same, but the sparrows are finding it more difficult to locate or catch them. Kate Vincent’s findings do, however, point out something that can be done to try and reverse the decline locally – feeding sparrows mealworms in the breeding season, as in this study
It is naturally important to try and find out why there are fewer bugs in our cities. Perhaps we have been too good at killing them off with pesticides, but there is one obvious change in London’s leafy suburbs since the end of the 1970s. They became a lot less leafy as the decades passed. Insects don’t normally feed on concrete, so it stands to reason that there are a lot fewer insects about!
urban habitat changes – paving sparrow paradise
Let us reflect on the changes in the urban residential environment over the years since the 1970s. The postwar social housing model with its even frontages and miles of privet hedges was dismantled by the Thatcher administration in the 1980s giving tenants a right to buy. This dramatically raised the level of home ownership, which in British society is generally considered A Good Thing. As the years rolled by, owner occupiers new and old increasingly owned cars, and many of Britain’s houses were not designed with car parking in mind. This started a trend in the 1990s that we are about halfway through, where many front gardens are paved over for parking.
As well as becoming more numerous over the years, cars have become much bigger with the increased popularity of people carriers in the late 1990s and now a general trend to 4×4 and sports utility vehicles. Previously, parking was often achieved with a couple of parallel strips of concrete set into the original grass, but this is not longer adequate. Complete paving is often selected since the spacing of a saloon car and a 4×4 wheels aren’t the same, and garden maintenance is reduced. Techniques exist now to concrete over a front garden in half a day using a cement mixer to pour on site and another machine for format the concrete into faux paving.
Other incentives add to the pressure on the humble patch of grass and hedge that made our suburbs earn the adjective ‘leafy’. Insurance companies often offer discounts for off-road parking, and some councils started to charge for residents’ parking permits in the 1990s for urban homeowners to park vehicles on the road in front of their houses.
All this of course reflects increasing wealth, home ownership and mobility which are good things in themselves. However, one outcome is that there is far less greenery in the residential environment. On a recent survey of an area of town with no original car parking half the front gardens had been paved over. With these gardens goes the vegetation that provided seeds and insects, and the hedges that provide sparrows with shelter, and formed wildlife corridors along which sparrows could travel in relative safety.
In addition to the pressure on the general greenery of the urban ladscape, modern roofing methods reduce nesting opportunities in the classic sparrow’s nest position in the eaves of the roof. The roof space becomes inaccessible and the number of gaps that appeared over time as wood warped is reduced.
It is difficult to analyze these changes in the habitat on a sound scientific basis. Changes in the built environment happen piecemeal as the result of many independent individual decisions. The changes are poorly documented – plannning permission isn’t needed to convert a front garden to a concrete carpark. It isn’t easy to separate the variables and establish controls – the loss of one garden and hedges is unlikely to affect the local sparrows, but the loss of half of them will. Putting them all back and testing if things get better next year isn’t an option.
The weakness of the scientific method is that what cannot be measured analytically shows up less in the analysis, but it is not necessarily irrelevant in this case. Most other habitats are more amenable to leaving one area alone which changing another, but the urban residential environment, with its patchwork ownership is particularly difficult to control. It is exactly this environment that the house sparrow has chosen as its preferred habitat. And it is exactly this intractability of this environment to scientific analyisis which means that the reason why the “cockney sparrer” has sounded the last chirp across the nation’s capital may be discovered too late to forestall the last chirp ringing out across our market towns over the next few years.
The BTO study used the alternative approach of taking the patchwork built environment as it was correlating sparrow numbers with the fragmented habitat. This showed a dependence of nest sites, and a dependence on nearby greenery, supporting the habitat hypothesis to some extent. However, the habitat was already fragmented – it is a pity that results aren’t available from the early 1980s as a control. It is also puzzling that the decline is not evenly spread – Berlin for instance has not suffer a sparrow decline as yet. Anybody who has been to that city will not fail to have noticed it has a lot more greenery in its wide avenues that say London or Paris.
failing sparrows in their hour of need
The scientific method has helped our bird organisations to greatly improve nature reserves, studying what works, and optimising their limited resources to greatest effect. Where it is possible to control the vast majority of the variables, establish control populations or roll back changes experimentally, the scientific method is the best and fastest method to optimize results.
However, science may yet fail the house sparrow in its hour of need, because of the difficulty of applying it to the sparrows’ chosen habitat. This seems to be delaying the formulation of any response. One aspect of that response could be to remove the financial pressure to introduce potentially sparrow-unfriendly (and somewhat human-unfriendly) changes like paving over the grass and remove hedging in front of many suburban homes. There is a difference between making costly changes to an environment without a sound scientific basis, and ceasing to subsidize changes which are probably sparrow-unfriendly, though as yet not proven scientifically. The science basis of the bird organisations is right where expensive action is needed for something that would conflict with many people’s interests. A far lower standard of proof is acceptable to simply cease encouraging the dismantling of the sparrows’ habitat and food supply.
Controlled parking zones may well still have their merits, but actually charging the council tax payer to park in the street is perhaps not the best way to go. In the end the built environment needs to serve its human population more than its sparrows. We may come to the sad conclusion that our thirst for concrete to park our sports utility vehicles is going to destroy our city sparrows. We may wish to spare a thought for how we may give some of our sparrows safe havens. If it means scattering nestboxes across our Royal Parks or keeping horses in an area – even allocating an area of derelict buildings to sparrows, then we should consider it.
The incessant chirp of the cock sparrow does not have the resonant beauty of the nightingale or the mellifluous tones of the blackbird. His chirp is nevertheless a spark of life holding sway against the mechanical loneliness of the urban environment. He has travelled a long way with us, our cock sparrer, and now our needs and his diverge. Let us spare him a thought, and ask ourselves whether it really means nothing to us that we now drive this cheery fellow traveller from our city environment.
It is not just the humble sparrow that would gain from slowing the switching out of leafy greenery for patterned concrete. We humans too might prefer to see softened greens of the trees and hedges rather than the grey concrete. There’s a balance to be struck here, and tipping the balance away from concrete would make a better world for us and our sparrows.
Sparrows Leave the cities RIP Cockney Sparrow
RSPB Save the house sparrow initiative
Bid to save sparrows launched

feeding Sparrows

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 07 May 2006 22:55:00 +0000

Sparrows are breeding now, so along the lines of this London project we’re feeding mealworms, since we don’t want the last chirp to ring out here. I like their chirping, and they’re a harmless little bird that would be missed. We’re getting a decent number of customers, as you can see in this video. It was nice to see the starling repelled – mealworms are too good for starlings. They can slum it on something cheaper.

video

Although London grabs the headlines, the lopping of hedges and the replacement of lawns with nice paving to get the second 4×4 off the road is happening in my neighbourhood too. I did a walk round surveying sparrows in the immediate area, and discovered more than half of people’s front gardens had been converted to a car parking space, which means the loss of a lot of sparrow hedges and grass with insects. Hopefully this mealworm feeder is making up for some of those lost food sources.
This fading out of sparrows is strange. At RSPB Minsmere, which is about as bird-friendly a place as you are going to get, the last sparrow chirp rang out over 20 years ago. I have a 1970s book which says they are “resident and abundant” there (Minsmere, Portrait of a Bird Reserve, Herbert Axell & Eric Hosking, 1977”) but I have never seen one mentioned in the site report or seen one there.
Finally, if you’re American and hate sparrows, note this web address is a .co.uk which means I’m British, and therefore entitled to be crazy :) House sparrows are native in Europe, and we’ve lived with them for thousands of years. They add a little bit of color to our towns and cities, and it is a source of great dismay to us that something seems to be killing them off – possibly us as we tidy up all our gardens and pave over the neighborhood to park our cars. Many British towns were laid out before cars so we don’t all have your garages and driveways, hence the urban pressure on space.
More sparrow decline links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2655535.stm
RSPB – Insect-friendly gardens may help to slow sparrows’ decline
London House Sparrow Appeal
Food Scarcity is hitting sparrows

Blackbird chipping

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sat, 06 May 2006 23:00:00 +0000

So you want to pack it in for the night. You’re a blackbird. You may have little ‘uns about. You know cats come out at night
So just before you hit the sack, you advertise for two and a half minutes to all the neighbourhood cats that you’re about to finish off for the day. Seems barmy to me. Mad.

Roosting blackbird

Firecrest, Shingle St

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:52:00 +0000

This little fellow is the devil’s own job to photograph. It didn’t venture from the bush for about an hour as far as I could see, but what it lacked in wanderlust it made up for in sheer incessant activity. Up and down, over and across the bramble bush it scanned – no sooner did I spot it from the corner of my eye and it was gone to scan another patch of the bush. So this is the best I can get- but he really does look as if his head is alight!
There was thin, high-pitched tone to him. No use for location :(
In the video clip he is at his most relaxed, lethargic, mode, staying in one place long enough to get all of about 5 seconds of video.

Tree Sparrows unmuted

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:45:00 +0000

Tree sparrows again. I love them – such a handsome bird. When I first met these guys about a year ago I believed they were mute because they weren’t particulary vocal at Rutland Water, and the sound of the chaffinches drowned them out.
However, they were chirping nearby, with the characteristic panache sparrows have. People say they chirp with a ‘country twang’ which you can sort of hear in this video.

Great Tit expelling Chaffinch from tree

noreply@blogger.com (Richard) — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:43:00 +0000

8am battle of a great tit and a chaffinch trying to claim the same tree. Focus starts on chaffy then moved to the great tit.

RSPB North Warren, Telinga. Windy – it was hard to keep the great tit in the boresight of the dish even though it was only 5-8m up in the tree.