Avian news

Item 1:

I recently purchased a camera trap, or trail camera, to capture sequences of animal behaviour on film.  To date I have been testing it and this morning, whilst I was working on other matters, I managed to capture a series of feeding visits to a hole board in my garden.  This is a not an experimental trial, the hole board is merely acting as a glorified bird table presently:

The images are not as sharp as I should like - normally I use a digital camcorder for such data collection - but they are good enough to code from and this device clearly has utility.  For example it will make a good back-up camera when filming experimental trials - filling in where I might otherwise fail to hit record etc.  It also gives time stamped footage (not shown here) that helps to build a general picture of visitation and duration, which is useful background data.

Item 2:

My PhD student, Rob, and I spent a day at our estuarine field site on the Norfolk coast yesterday.  We were there to piece together a catalogue of foraging behaviours in black-headed, common and herring gulls.  This meant spending a deal of time craning our necks down telescope, binoculars and a camcorder to take notes and get film footage for later.  The weather was mostly in our favour at this very exposed site, and we did well.

Just as we were thinking about leaving Rob noticed a common gull flying up above a rocky patch of the shoreline and repeatedly dropping a shellfish of some kind.  After a few drops the gull settled and picked out the soft flesh. This behaviour is not unheard of - indeed Tinbergen wrote about it in 1961, and even then it was old news -  but I have only seen it on the north east coast of the USA before, so this was a rarity for me.  Shortly after this sighting we spotted a herring gull adopting the same procedure a little further along that part of the shoreline.  Rob tried to film this at short notice, but on our next visit I will set up a camera and see what I can record.

Prior to arriving at the site, Rob and I did a quick sortie further into the estuary to look for loafing gulls in amongst the seemingly endless groupings of barnacle geese.  Whilst I was walking along a dyke, forming part of the traditional flood defences, I heard a skylark singing high above me.  This is not normally heard in late February in the UK but I managed to also get a visual identification of the bird, high above me.  I later heard another near to our shellfish smashing gulls, just above the dunes.

All of the day's observations were uploaded to the BTO Bird Track website via my smartphone app.