Golden Eagles Fledging

A Golden Eagle Aquila chrysaetos eyrie set in a large Scots Pine

It is now time for golden eagle chicks to leave their nests and I have been checking several sites to monitor their breeding success. The birds usually fledge in their tenth week, which is a long time for any bird to sit out as it slowly grows, filling in the hours, days and weeks watching the world go by between occasional feeds and long sleeps as it develops from a tiny downy chick to a sturdy eagle.

The adults began nesting in March, laid their eggs at the end of that month, incubated them for six weeks, and now will have to still provide food for the fledglings for a few months. So most of an adult golden eagle's year is filled by rearing young.

This eyrie was built in a multiple fork in the tree, a massive tree with a wide trunk and a magnificent spreading crown
- a true forest giant  

The fledglings' first flight can be a wobbly affair, and this bird will likely take a short one to a neighbouring tree branch. I was surprised that it hadn't taken that step as it was so well developed, but is was raining that day, so perhaps it was waiting for the best flight conditions for that important stage of life. Other birds I have checked lately have left the nest, one twin had gone off around a corner and was nearly a kilometre away from the nest, yet it's sibling was still in the nest - but testing its wings with big strong thrusts and hopping about the nest.

There will be young eagles jumping from trees and cliffs all over the Highlands this week, what a thought, but they will have testing times ahead.

This eyrie was a few metres wide and although the bird is fully grown size-wise, it can be distinguished as a chick by the bright yellow cere and base to its bill. Adults have less bright bills, they are more generally grey-coloured.

Superb camouflage

Superb camouflage

While studying waders in northern Norway I was repeatedly impressed by the adaptation of these birds in their use of camouflage as their main defense from predators. Camouflage only works well if an animal does not move, relying on their cryptic plumage patterns to conceal them until the very last moment as potential predators, including humans pass by. This tends to make them rather difficult to study.

A Broad-billed Sandpiper hides amongst sedges

One species of wader which breeds in mires on the tundra is the Broad-billed Sandpiper Limicola falcinellus and they are very easily overlooked. These birds, about Starling-size, forage on mats of sphagnum moss on the edge of mire pools, creeping through the sedges. Their plumage has a background of dark browns like those of the muddy surface, with pale stripes that resemble the blades of the sedges. They match their habitat exactly.

Easier to see if you can pick out an eye

And if you think these are difficult to see, try to find the bird in the next photograph.

A Jack Snipe lies quiet amongst the sedges

Another species that lives in these mires is the Jack Snipe  Lymnocryptes minimus. Their plumage is like that of the Broad-billed Sandpipers, and the birds are of similar size. These two unrelated species have adapted similar plumages and behaviour, and they breed successfully, so their convergent evolution is evidence of the effectiveness of their survival strategy.

Even when seen close up they are not easy to discern

As I look down on these birds and admire their adaptation to their habitat, I often think to myself, how many have I walked past?

From above, the stripes on the Jack Snipe resemble the pale old leaves of the sedge

I study many cryptic species, but these waders are some of the the trickiest birds to find, they are true masters of the art of camouflage.

Once again, if it weren't for the eye....

Ousted cuckoo?

An adult male Lapland Bunting Calcarius lapponicus 

While surveying birds in northern Norway I came across a Lapland Bunting nest, which is not too unusual as they are common birds in the tundra there, although there was something different about this one. There were chicks in the nest as well as an unhatched egg and an eggshell, again nothing unusual there, except that the eggshell was of the wrong colouring for a Lapland Bunting egg.

The eggshell was a dull blue colour with brown freckling,
unlike the grey-brown background with scribbly line markings of the bunting egg

I immediately thought of a Cuckoo Cuculus canorus having laid an egg in the nest, so I checked the young to see if any were a cuckoo. None were, so what had happened? Thinking it through, the only explanation I can think of is that the buntings had detected the cuckoo when it hatched and ousted it from the nest.

The cuckoo egg did not resemble those of the buntings. It was more like a composite match between a Meadow Pipit Anthus pratensis and a Red-Spotted Bluethroat Luscinia svecica - two other common passerines in the area, and likely species to be targeted by cuckoos. Pipit eggs are grey-brown with dark brown freckles, and bluethroat eggs are dull blue coloured with tiny faint freckles. Yet this egg seemed to still pass unnoticed by the hosts.

The cuckoo eggshell on the left, the unhatched bunting egg on the right

I checked the nest a few days later and all the chicks, four, were alive and similar in plumage - all were buntings. So it seems that a cuckoo had failed in its attempt to dupe the buntings into rearing its chick. They perhaps detected the cuckoo chick when it hatched as different from their own and ejected it. This must happen more often than we assume, for there is an arms race between cuckoos and their hosts. In this case the cuckoo seemed to have laid its egg too late for the chick to gain the advantage of hatching first and ousting the buntings' eggs or newly hatched chicks.

Then, why had the cuckoo laid its egg in a bunting nest, were there too few pipits or bluethroat nests with eggs for it to parasitise in this late cold Spring?

The growing bunting chicks

Red-spotted Bluethroats

An adult male red-spotted Bluethroat Luscinia svecica 

One of the more abundant passerines in northern Norway is the red-spotted Bluethroat, a robin-like bird that lives in birch and willow scrub, foraging for insects on the ground, while flicking from bush to bush. It is usually their tinkling song, or clicking contact call that gives away their presence, or thiier distinctive short flight low through the scrub.

An adult female red-spotted Bluethroat 

Most illustrations are of the brightly coloured males as they do have splendid throat colouring.  So I have added an image here of a female in breeding plumage. She has the basic colouring of the males, but duller and she has a darker, streaked breast than the males. This is because she needs to be less conspicuous while caring for her eggs and young.

Although conspicuous when singing from the top of a bush with their breast puffed up, most of the time, even male Bluethroats are secretive, passing quietly through the lower branches, dipping between shadows.

The intensity of the throat colouring varies between males and females, not all are bright, and the pattern varies in the amount of red in the spot, blue on the throat, or black, white and red on the lower bands. And I wonder how the birds see these colours, for the blue feathers have a shine to them, do the birds see an even brighter image via ultra-violet light sensitive visual perception?

The blue feathers on their throat, glisten in the sunshine, adding a marvellous metallic tint to the birds' plumage

North Norway

A fresh burst of green opens over the northern Norway landscape as the birch leaves open

I'm in northern Norway for the second part of June, over mid-summer with twenty-four hour light. The main reason to be here is as part of a long-term study of breeding arctic waders, but there is so much wildlife activity, I thought I might add a general picture first.

There are high numbers of voles this year, especially grey-sided voles, and as such many predatory species are breeding. I saw a red fox the other day carrying a mouthful of voles back to its cubs. And other predators breeding include; rough-legged buzzard, hawk owl, short-eared owl, long-tailed skua and great grey shrike. Many people have heard of lemming population peaks, but they are not the only rodent in the arctic whose numbers fluctuate so dramatically, several vole species do also, and their numbers can influence the numbers of breeding animals too.

A Grey-sided Vole  Myodes rufocanus - an important food source for so many predators in Scandinavia

During the last peak in vole and lemming numbers a few years ago, I saw most of the usual predators breeding, but no great grey shrikes Lanius excubitor, that was because the rodents were in such high numbers over most of Scandinavia that the shrikes, which probably did not need to fly so far north to breed, stopped farther south where there were just as many if not even higher densities of rodents. However, this year there are shrikes breeding in the north and the nest illustrated held six chicks, of various sizes. They are all likely to fledge as the adults were bringing in plenty of food.

Six young shrikes lie quietly in their nest, some smaller than others,
 but all will likely fledge as there are so many voles about

As with great grey shrikes in winter, in summer they also spend most of their time perched high watching for prey, but the irony of these shots is that I photographed the vole directly below the nest tree while the birds were about twenty metres away. That was one very lucky vole, so far....

The adult shrikes sit on high perches in nearby trees

Hilltop waders

A Dunlin Calidris alpina watches quietly - easily overlooked as it is little taller than the grasses

Last weekend I was surveying waders in the eastern Highlands, up on the top of the hills. It is on plateaux like these where Arctic-alpine waders such as Dunlin and Golden Plover breed, and they are beautiful birds in their breeding plumage. But they can be tricky to find.

The Dunlin can be obvious when they are displaying, chasing one another around the hilltops, singing their trilling song, but once they have eggs or chicks they hide. They are small, and even when they run away, they look not much larger than a small rodent, sneaking through the grass rather than flying away. Mostly, they will stand still and watch people walk by, oblivious of their presence.

A Dunlin runs through the grass

A Golden Plover Pluvialis apricaria stands alert, calling in alarm - difficult to not notice when watching over their chicks

Golden Plover are often as secretive when with eggs. Although some will walk or fly away and call in their peeping alarm call, many sit tight and watch people go by. But once their chicks have hatched the plovers are on constant alert, calling in loud repetitive peeps whenever a human or other potential predator approaches. Meanwhile, their chicks lie low in the grass or heather, their wonderfully golden down mimicking the yellow moss that underlies the taller plants.

Four golden plover chicks - a day old and soon ready to leave the nest 

Golden Plover chicks are some of the most beautifully coloured wader chicks, but the birds don't live on such anthropomorphic terms, don't yet perfectly matched to their hiding places up on the high mossy plateaux.

Golden balls of fluff - these plover chicks are marvelously coloured

Long flight for food

A rock pipit collecting insects from the lawn

While staying with friends in Durness recently there was a steady trip of birds coming to the lawn to forage for insects, especially immediately after it was cut. The list included black-headed and common gulls, pied wagtails and meadow pipits. Special visitors were dunlin - it was great to watch these moorland/shore birds from the lounge window. But I was attracted by the rock pipits, for they seemed to be flying quite a distance down to the shore with food for their chicks. So, I followed their flightline to see just how far they were travelling.

The lawn where the pipits were catching prey, seen from inside the house,
with the Ferryman's Cottage in the background

I was impressed with what I found. The first step, as far as I could follow the birds from the window, brought me to the shore at the bottom of the garden where I found a pair of rock pipits feeding young in a nest in a grassy bank above the tide-line. But those birds were catching insects locally, less than fifty metres from their nest, they weren't the ones from the lawn. So I watched and waited for the lawn birds to fly past. And they did. They came down over the bank then flew low over the water and set out across the estuary with their catch.

The kyle between the mainland and the Cape-side,
the rock pipits were carrying food back to their nest below the cottage

The estuary is the Kyle of Durness which separates the Cape Wrath peninsula from the mainland. I watched the birds fly right over the low tide sands and water channel, several hundred metres wide, and for a total journey of over a kilometre, to feed their young in a bank below the old Ferryman's Cottage. Why the birds were flying so far to collect food is intriguing, but I am never amazed by what I learn about wildlife, simply ever-more respectful of their capabilities.

A brood of four rock pipit chicks lie quiet in their nest - waiting for their parents to deliver more food

At the end of a rainbow

A rainbow ends in a grass tussock

Sunshine and showers are a good mix for watching birds as they take cover while the rain is on, then pop out and get busy as soon as it stops. And rainbows appear.

The grass at the end of the rainbow - nothing there

When a shower passed by last week, I noticed a skylark collecting food and watched it fly twice into the same tussock of grass. So I was certain that there was something there and began to walk over to investigate. Then another sharp shower flashed over and a rainbow curved down into the spot where the skylark had been.

Yes there is - three skylark chicks in their nest

At first glance there was nothing to see at the bottom of the rainbow, but the treasure lay hidden. I parted the grass and there it was, a brood of three skylark chicks, all warm and cosy, and keeping still and quiet to hide from me, a potential predator.

A brood of three, well feathered with still some wisps of down

I closed the grass up over them and left them to it. They would fledge in a day or so, scattering through the grass to separate hiding places for safety, and their parents would fly to each in turn to feed them until they became independent - a further strategy for protection from predators. Ground-nesting birds need to be cautious.

It's the eye that breaks the camouflage

Sad timing

A ptarmigan nest site on a high hillside - but look closely

It's a busy busy time of year for fieldwork in the Highlands at the moment and although the weather has improved, there have been some casualties from the previous week's storm. One such, which I have found, was this clutch-brood of ptarmigan.

The nest after the chicks had hatched and the hen had led away her surviving chick

I was up in the hills surveying and checking on the progress of a population of ptarmigan that I have been studying for many years now. Their numbers were low and as the birds were sparse, they were a bit difficult to find, but I did confirm that there were three pairs in the area. The males were all in one flock as they tend to leave their hens about the time when the chicks are due to hatch. And I found a nest where the hen had hatched her chicks.

Two unhatched eggs and a dead chick, which had never dried after hatching, were left in the nest.

I immediately saw that all was not well. There were two unhatched eggs in the nest along with a dead chick and another dead chick lay outside the nest. This was on the Wednesday and there had been a wild storm on the Monday - the day the chicks had hatched. The embryos in the two unhatched eggs had probably died during the cold wet weather that the hen had to sit through while incubating. I have seen eggs fail to hatch in similar circumstances before. Even ptarmigan, which can endure snow storms while incubating, cannot keep all their eggs warm throughout prolonged cold weather.

One chick which had dried after hatching was found dead about a metre downhill from the nest.
Left behind as it was too weak?

Such bad timing. If the chicks had only hatched the following day, the hen could have perhaps saved the two chicks which likely died from hypothermia during the storm. However, there were remains of three hatched eggs, so the hen seemed to have led one chick away safely, so all were not lost. And the good news is that two other hens were still sitting on eggs so their chicks should have a better start now that the weather is warmer. Although, it needs to warm up quickly as the vegetation, including the chicks' main food plants, blaeberry and small herbaceous species, have only now began to open their leaves, and there are still very few insects in the area to supplement their diet.

This ptarmigan was still incubating her eggs, hopefully they will hatch while the weather is warmer and drier.

Wild Pansies - a blue fest

Blue, white and yellow are a perfect mix for flower colour - to the human eye at least.
Have a look at Van Gogh's irises 

Yesterday was wild and windy, again, so not a day for the hills. Instead, I went out to Rattray Head in north-east Scotland, just to get out somewhere and have a look see, and as luck brings to those who do, the sun was shining on the headland. Sand dunes rise high at the head, hiding the lighthouse from view until seen through a gap or from the tops of the marram grass-covered dunes. And it was as I walked through the dunes that I noticed the ground change colour from pale yellow and green to bright blue. Wild pansies Viola tricolor had taken over a hollow.

The delicate flowers were bobbing at all angles in the wind

Wild pansies are also known by the popular name of heartsease, which gives a clue to their use in herbal remedies and their history in folklore. However, I have no knowledge of that so will stick to the their beauty and form. It is a grassland species and this stand was of about half an acre in the landward side of the sand dune system. There were numerous rabbits in the area, some even grazing in the open at mid-day, and they had cropped the grassland short. A soft sward had developed, allowing the pansies to form a mat, so it seems that the rabbits don't eat the plant's leaves. Herbal properties can be species specific.

Ranks and ranks of fresh faces with blue top petals 

I have never seen such an abundant spread of these flowers. Despite all the cool northerly winds, and the resultant retarded growth of so many plants this spring, it is good to see something thriving in these conditions. No matter the weather, it will be good for something, and this year, in the the north-east it has certainly been good for the pansies.

The short rabbit-clipped green grass made an excellent habitat for the flowers to show,
 in woodland grassland they are often crowded out by the grasses

Other animals in the area, which were benefiting from the rabbits' cropping, were meadow pipits, skylarks and a pair of stonechats, all catching insects on the short sward. And linnets were picking at seeds that were too small for me to see. The pipits were feeding large young in their nests and the female stonechat was incubating six eggs in her nest tucked into the dense base of a clump of marram.

A meadow pipit's view of the blue 

From a distance, the blue petals cast a gentle wash over the grassland, their intensity only became evident from within the hollow.

The pansies covered the floor of the hollow

And from a distance, the lighthouse shone white on blue.

The flowers even crept up to the top edge of the dunes,

 looking out over the lighthouse 

Confident Ptarmigan

A hen ptarmigan sits on her nest, quite relaxed - confident but watchful

I have been surveying rock ptarmigan on the hilltops in the far north-west of the Scottish Highlands over the past few weeks and they are now incubating their eggs. The eggs will take about three weeks to hatch, so the birds have to select their nest sites carefully if they are to gain shelter from the type of wild wind and rain they have had to endure recently.

I found this hen ptarmigan soon after finding her mate, who was about a hundred metres uphill watching over her. As I approached him, he flew off then landed about two hundred metres away, giving a brief croaking alarm to the hen. I knew by his behaviour that he would have a hen on a nest somewhere nearby. Although there was a seemingly endless choice of places where she could have been hiding, with years of experience, I took a look over the area and checked what I considered the most likely place where she might be. It helps to think like a ptarmigan and reason why a bird would choose what features to nest near. And there she was, quietly sitting on her nest as I approached, relying on her camouflage to conceal her in the the short vegetation, which was only about seven centimetres tall.

She was nesting in the short Arctic-alpine heath on the summit plateau of a hill

Unlike red grouse, a closely related species which hide and nest in or under the taller heather on the lower moorland, ptarmigan live successfully on the short Arctic-alpine heath which is seldom tall enough for them to hide beneath. They rely heavily on boulders or exposed bedrock for shelter and concealment. Their plumage colouring matches both the heath plants and the lichen-covered rock. Rock ptarmigan are never far from rock of some kind, hence their name.

She had placed her nest close into the lee of a large boulder

I hadn't taken my main camera or lenses with me that day as I had to walk over twenty kilometres of wet heath and bog, climb the hill, and walk into a strong wind. So I only took the binoculars and telescope, and my mobile phone, which was all I had to photograph the ptarmigan with. No problem though, as I always talk to any ptarmigan I approach, for what predator talks to their prey before pouncing on them? I sat down slowly and gently a few metres from her and began to chat. Initially, she had been holding her head low and I could see her breathing deeply. Then, after a minute or so, she had accepted me, lifted her head and began breathing more slowly. I inched towards her and took a few shots, explaining what I was doing all the time and telling her how much I appreciated her life on the high tops. I don't think she understood a word I said, but there was some form of understanding between us and I am sure that she was confident all the while that if I approached too close, she could jump off and fly away unharmed. If any animal uses camouflage for concealment, it needs to be confident in its effectiveness, and evolution needs to have honed the animal's cryptic colouring to perfection. I think this applied to that ptarmigan as a few hundred metres away there was a large cliff and half-way down that cliff there was a pair of golden eagles with a hungry chick. I left the ptarmigan and wished her luck.

From an eagle's eye-view,she was well concealed, as her cryptic plumage matched the colours of the heath