Crested Tit and Red Squirrel

 I took a woodland stroll, on one of those rare sunny, early Autumn days in the Highlands, heading to the RSPB’s reserve at Loch Garten, on the edge of Abernethy Forest. Red Admirals basked on a mini digger in the car park, enjoying the warming sunshine ahead of their migration. I take the path past the new buildings, under the dappled shade. Although Garten is a pine woodland, it still takes on autumnal colours, as the birch understory turns to yellow, and the few scattered Rowans take on vivid shades of orange before the leaves drop.

Today was the first day the Visitor’s Centre is closed, and I am not alone, a few tourists wander bewildered in frustrated hope of coffee, and the bird feeders still hang, full of peanuts, against the red pine trunks, among the big plantation trees fringing the paths through the wet bog woodland. Chaffinches and coal tits are in attendance, making use of the provided bounty of peanuts, but there are scarcer, less familiar birds here. I eat my lunch and settle on one of the carved wooden benches.

 

The crested tit is heard before it is seen. They are vocal little birds and their call is distinctive, a high, surprisingly loud, slightly confrontational sounding trill. Then it emerges from the small pine sapling and pecks at the peanuts, confiding as a Robin, and as at home on the feeders as a Blue Tit in a suburban garden.  A tiny bird, only a little bigger than a coal tit, grey and prominently crested, a delicate pattern of black markings picking out the facial features, and distinctly warm, red brown coloured eyes catching the Autumn sunshine.

 

In the British Isles, Crested Tits are confined to the Cairngorms region, tied closely to the Caledonian pine woods there. They are reputed to be shy; though these individuals seemed as bold as any garden bird, happily making use of the peanuts provided for them. They are found throughout Europe, and are not even closely confined to pine woods across much of their range, leading to speculation the Scottish birds may be genetically distinct. Relatively sedentary birds, there cannot be a great deal of gene flow between this population and those separated by the length of Great Britain or the broad North Sea. So they cling on in relative isolation, doing their thing as they have done since the ice age. While in Autumn and Winter they can be drawn down to feeders in the woods, in Spring and Summer, during the breeding season, they are almost undetectable, remaining concealed in the high canopy, frustrating the summer birders who come looking for them, unless they are lucky enough to spot one or more dropping down to a puddle for water.

 

My feeder and two crestie companions draw a small circle of admirers, I am not the only birder with a camera who has noticed the light is good today. And something of a show of woodland wildlife is unfolding, as the low blaeberry shrubs rustle and part, and a young Red Squirrel gingerly approaches. He clambers up the log from which my feeder hangs, dappled sunlight catching his deep russet fur. He knows we are here, and still approaches, nevertheless his approach is far more cautious than that of a park Grey Squirrel with which readers in England are more familiar. He is notably more cautious than his continental cousins, which, somewhat counterintuitively, remain the common parkland squirrel from Paris to Krakow to Korea. He watches the crestie on the feeder, and then, surprisingly, seems to wait his turn on it. I manage to capture a few photos of these two icons of the Scottish pine woods, with the two in the same frame. The Red Squirrel’s story in the UK and its decline, first due to persecution and then to competition with greys, and the squirrel pox introduced with them, is well known, but here in the highlands, though never in the densities that Greys reach in deciduous woodlands down South, they do quite well.

 

They’re not uncommon elsewhere in Europe, where they remain the only squirrel species, and in some places can be found in urban parks, living a similar lifestyle to the greys in English cities. But here among the tall pines they still feel wild, native and exciting. And exceedingly beautiful. The pine woods here are not welcoming to the Greys, failing to offer nutrition in sufficient densities to support these bulkier, lazier arboreal beasts, but there is enough food here to allow the reds, which are by no means a pinewood specialist, the chance to survive and, justabout, for now, to thrive.

 

RSPB Hodbarrow, or The Start of the Northern Summer

I want to blog about the buzzards, I really want to, but nothing but incoherent rage can come out of my mouth on the subject at the moment. Indeed, I cannot talk about it without incitement so I’m not going to. Instead I am going to tell you about all the trips I managed to squeeze in, between the GIS coursework, in  the last few days, the days summer arrived in Lancashire! Instead of raging against English (anti) Nature, and the game industry to whom they are in thrall, I am going to tell you all what a nice week I have had.  There will be more to come, think of this as “part one.”

Sunday took Natty and I to the RSPB and National Nature Reserve at Hodbarrow, on the West coast of Cumbria, near Millom, where apparently there is an ex RAF airfield and possibly a prison. It is also home to a large coastal lagoon where a colony of very special, on a UK level at least, Terns live. No sooner had we left the car park, and overcome the disappointment that for some reason dogs were permitted on the reserve, we were surrounded by the sound of birdsong. We could hear the scratchy melodies of Whitethroat, the full-on techno beats of Sedge Warbler, the tumbling melodies of willow warbler, and the repetitious, two-note song of Chiffchaff, the melody with flourish at the end of Chaffinch. A pair of blackcaps hopped about in an oak tree. The paths were lined with yellow flowering Gorse.  There were a few white butterflies about.

Rounding a corner, passing a pond attended by the obligatory pair of Mute Swans and large numbers of Swallows and Sand Martins, Natalie, ever the sharp-eyed entomologist, found me the season’s first Damselfly, sunning itself on a blade of grass. By the season and the red colour, it was probably a Pyrrhosoma nymphula, A large Red Damselfly. A couple of fresher damselflies were about, still to develop their adult markings.  The trees had only just entered full leaf, and one or two were still sparse. To see the first Damselfly of the year was a relief. The snow in Bowland and down into the Peaks at Easter is still a recent memory, as was Roeburndale in late April, sliding about in the pouring rain, and noticing the bluebells were still underground. We walked on and found a small cove. A few crab skins lay about on the beach. Out on the water we could see some Red Breasted Merganser, and a few Eider and Shelduck. Redshank and crows foraged in the mud. We were out of Morecambe Bay by now, having driven through the South Western corner of the Lake District National Park. Across the river Duddon the fells of South Lakeland stood out above the estuary mud.

We were crossing a small headland when we saw a bird of prey being mobbed, fairly relentlessly, by gulls. It drew toward us over the estuary. There is nothing unusual about seeing a buzzard or some such crossing a small strip of water, or getting mobbed by gulls, but raising my binoculars, this was no buzzard. Its long wings arched slightly like a gulls’, and its body was white, a dark stripe running through its eye. This was an Osprey! We couldn’t see a tag or a ring, and shortly the gulls had seen it off, back over the Duddon Estuary. To my mind this seemed too late to be a passage migrant, the internet reports the Rutland Water Ospreys already have chicks, it may have been one of the adults now nesting in the Lake District.

We had lunch on the beach and dipped our toes in the still freezing water. A few Sandwich and Common Terns flew by, some diving for fish, and some skimming the water surface. Hodbarrow is one of the few places little terns can be seen in the UK. They breed on islands left behind by abandoned Iron workings on the site. The industrial history of the Hodbarrow reserve is rich, and plain to see, the muddy soil stained red by haematite, old quarries scarring the landscape and the odd fragment of a concrete structure protruding among the rushes. We walked the sea wall to the hide were we were entertained by the pretty Little Terns, sweet looking little birds with black caps, yellow bills and short forked tails. They were feisty, defending their nest site against anything, mobbing even larger terns as they passed by. They had arrived only a few days ago, but now there seemed to be as many as forty of them, nest scrapes already established on the bare bars of stone in the lagoon, presumably stacks of spoil from some quarrying operation. Despite their aggression little terns are infamously vulnerable to predators. Here, electric fences, and broken fences, were all over the islands, presumably from attemptos to protect these nationally rare (but globally distributed) birds.  I have seen Little Tern before, but only when I was volunteering in Gialova in Greece, in a place which bore odd similarities to Hodbarrow.  A few Eider swam in the still water, one of the males very vocal, tipping his head back and making the classic Eider call, perhaps best described as an impression of Kenneth Williams. The smart sea ducks dabbled about for a while. Great crested grebes swam around, paired up, no longer dancing as the summer is now in full swing, but not yet with the little chicks on their backs, as will I have no doubt charm us in the months to come.

We ended the day with a spot of sea watching, in the distance, Gannets and Kittywakes could be seen diving for fish in the open water among flocks of terns and black headed gulls. Gulls and Eider, and a few Red Breasted Merganser bobbed on the surface. The falling temperature and building wind coming in off the sea reminded us of our latitude, but among the birds, the swifts and swallows flying all around us on the walk back to the car park, we could be in no doubt that the summer had begun.