Feeding the birds

I expect you have seen the latest recommendations from the BTO on feeding garden birds.  The new guidance is to stop feeding seeds and peanuts from today to the end of October in the hope of reducing transmission of trichomonosis which has caused declines in populations of chaffinches and greenfinches.

The problem is widespread but seems a bit less up here compared with farther south.  This graph from the BTO Garden BirdWatch shows the reporting rate for greenfinches in the North East.

Compare that with the South East.

These are similar data for chaffinches.

I don't remember ever seeing a finch on the peanut feeder so I think I'll continue with peanuts until they are all used up and see what happens.  That will be a relief to the woodpeckers who will be here with their fledglings in June.

I reckon I only see about one sick finch a year here.  One effect of stopping feeding is that all the finches will disappear so recording of both healthy and sick finches will presumably plummet but I expect the BTO experts have thought about that.  I'll be disappointed not to see the birds but I guess it is all for the greater good.

At the moment I still have lots of siskins, redpolls, bullfinches, greenfinches and chaffinches outside the kitchen window.  They are going to be very disappointed.

My prize visitor, a brambling, was only here for a week before setting off home to Scandinavia about three weeks ago.

Assuming most people comply with the advice it's going to be interesting to see what happens, both here and nationally.  I expect I'll be getting complaints from the local clean-up squad as well.

Charting the decline of sparrows and starlings

There have been many changes in the wildlife in my garden over the years, perhaps the most dramatic being the recent disappearance of tree sparrows and starlings.  I have been submitting data to the BTO Garden Birdwatch since it started in 1995 and data from my garden are available online from 2003.  I was keen on graphs when I was at work, often using them to investigate changes over time.  So here's a graph.  It shows the number of weeks per year that I recorded a starling or a tree sparrow in 2003-2025.

Starlings were regular residents in the garden from when I moved here 37 years ago.  They nested in tree holes each year, disappearing after the chicks fledged and returning six months later. There were no nests in 2024 or 2025 and I haven't seen a starling here this year.

Tree sparrow was a very rare bird here until 2012.  Although I counted the nests in nest boxes they also nested in tree holes so I don't think the nest box numbers are all that useful but there were nine in 2016, only one in 2023 and none in 2024 or 2025.  You'll see from the graph they were here all the time for a few years and records fell precipitously since 2019.  I have only seen one once this year.

Both starlings and tree sparrows are in decline nationally and both are red-listed on the UK Birds of Conservation Concern although the national picture isn't quite as dramatic as the changes here.  The UK breeding population of starlings fell by 57% from 1995 to 2023.  During the same period the tree sparrow breeding population increased by 39% but that was after a catastrophic decline from the 1970s - numbers now are still only 5% of what they were.  I found couple of graphs on the BTO website that sort of mirror my experience but use different data on a different timescale.  This is their starling graph.

And their tree sparrows.

There have been two other major developments in the garden in recent years which may be related to these changes.  The first was the arrival of ring-necked parakeets that have been here every day since late 2022.  They are tree hole nesters and could potentially compete with starlings for nest holes but they don't nest in the garden and wouldn't fit through a nest box hole. Here's another version of my graph.

The second change, which is probably more relevant, has been a change in the status of American grey squirrels.  The first grey squirrel was seen here in 2005 and the last native red squirrel in 2016.  For 18 years I was part of a team exercising grey squirrel control locally in the hope that the red squirrels could be preserved.  However, the grey tide was unstoppable and I eventually gave up in early 2023 after everyone else had already done so.  Grey squirrels have been here every day since.  They also nest in tree holes and the nearest to the house is in what used to be a starling nest.  I suspect the starlings and sparrows may have seen the resident squirrels and decided otherwise go elsewhere.  On this version of the graph the grey box shows when grey squirrels were resident (and not persecuted).

The grey squirrels have a lot to answer for but there isn't much I can do about them.  After last week's post I haven't seen the stoat again and I think it may also have been put off by the squirrels.  Of course both the parakeets and the squirrels, or neither, might be involved.  It would be nice to think I might see starlings and tree sparrows nesting here one day.  Here's hoping.

Conflict on StoatCam

The stoat has been having a bit of bother with the neighbours recently.  A few weeks ago I posted a video of the stoat chasing a squirrel but sometimes it is the other way round.  A male stoat could kill an adult squirrel but a stoat of either sex is more of a threat to the squirrel's young.  Squirrels are nesting in the trees in the garden and I hope the stoat will nest in the wall so there is a very uneasy relationship at the moment.

I made a short video of some of the action on the trail cameras.  A lot is off camera and the views were a bit distant so the images are cropped with some loss of quality but you get the idea.

The stoat (I am assuming it is always the same one) shows up on the cameras regularly and I have had two very close sightings in the past week.  The first was through the window for a few seconds from about a metre away when it climbed up through a hedge.  The second about 10m from the front door was bit longer as it probably felt safer at that distance.  It seems to cope with me being around but I just hope the conflict with the squirrels doesn't put it off.  Here's brief video of the stoat with what looks like a field vole.

Weasels are still around in the garden but they are too small and too sensible to get involved with the squirrels.  Most times I see them dashing through the camera box but this one came out to play on the wall while the stoat and the squirrels weren't looking.

Varmints on WeaselCam

My two camera boxes are in the garden to look for weasels and stoats but I occasionally put in a few seeds to attract smaller animals and the cameras then record voles, mice and shrews.  I recently added larger outer entrance pipes, hoping to entice in a passing stoat but instead less welcome visitors have taken advantage.

News from WeaselCam

I have been running two camera boxes in the garden for the past few months to keep an eye on weasels and whatever else makes an appearance.  There were 12 weasel sightings in December, only one in January and so far there have been three in February.  On one morning last week one camera recorded an American grey squirrel, a weasel and a stoat all within two hours. The sighting of the stoat was frustratingly brief as it was too quick for the camera.  It only captured this frame of the tail.

The fascinating thing is that it shows partial ermine colouration with a white tail.  In northern regions some stoats turn white in winter, retaining just a black tail tip, although this far north (55°N) the change is more often partial.  We can't see the rest of this one but it is obviously mostly still brown.  Below is how it (or another one) looked in early December.

Here is the weasel from the same box.

And here's the squirrel!

Weasels usually explore the box rather than just running through and very often return more than once during the same recording.  I wish stoats did the same - perhaps I need a bigger box and a bigger pipe.  This weasel activity was all recorded within two minutes although I have edited out the gaps.

The day after the stoat appeared in the box I saw it from the kitchen window, just outside the box. I was willing it to go in again but instead it ran right across the lawn towards me with something in its mouth, presumably prey.  With luck it will stick around and I'll be able to post more pictures.

Stoatally different

Since first seeing a weasel in my camera box last month I have had four cameras watching, one in the box and three outside.  The other day one of them saw a stoat investigating the pipe leading into the box.  Unfortunately the stoat thought better of it and turned round and came back out.

You can see in the photos above, and in the video below, the straight border between the stoat's brown and white fur (in the weasel it is wiggly) and its long black-tipped tail.

When I first made this camera box I used old Victorian land drain pipes as entrances and in retrospect they were too small.  There was one very brief visit from a weasel but otherwise the camera has seen only shrews, mice and voles.  As soon as I used larger pipes last month the weasels were in.  Although a weasel can fit in a very small hole I suspect it is more comfortable exploring a hole in which it can easily turn round.  The same is probably true for the larger stoat, so when it saw the smaller entrance at the far end of the pipe it gave up and left.

As soon as I saw the video I spent the rest of the afternoon making a new camera box.  This one is again made from a plastic under-bed storage box but now the larger pipes fit inside the box and there is nothing smaller inside.  There is a still larger pipe on one side.

I have lined the box with slates so it looks OK inside.  And the next day a weasel came to check it out.  The weasel moves so quickly that it was already behind the camera by the time recording started - there is a 400ms (0.4s) trigger delay.

I have been hoping that the stoat would return and enter the new box but so far that hasn't happened.  A weasel has been back, and again it was in so quickly that it caught out the camera. It is difficult to see in the video because of the speed of movement but the weasel has a quick wee on the floor to leave its scent mark - that accounts for its hunched spread-legged posture. It is probably done as a message to other weasels and stoats and doesn't seem to have deterred nocturnal visits from the small mammals, although they now don't appear in daylight.  This time we get a good view of the wiggly border between the brown and white fur of the weasel.

Stoats are part of the natural world here but on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, where there are no native land mammals, they are a non-native invasive species.  Early European settlers took rabbits to New Zealand and when the rabbits got out of control they brought in stoats to control the rabbits.  It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect it was a predictable disaster.  The stoats devastated the native ground-nesting birds and there is now a stoat eradication plan.  (There is a similar problem, and similar plan, on Orkney.)

I read on a New Zealand website that stoats are partial to mayonnaise so I thought I would give it a try.  For good measure I added a bit of peanut butter.  And look who turned up to take the peanut butter - our own non-native invasive species, an American grey squirrel.

The mayonnaise was eaten by bank voles and wood mice overnight so that plan didn't work either.  Next morning I put in a few sunflower seeds for the voles but of course, now that it knows there might be food in the box, the squirrel turned up to eat them.

So I think the plan at the moment is to put in no food and hope that the weasels' and stoats' curiosity will attract them to the camera box.

Good news and bad news

First the good news.  These photos were taken yesterday in Gosforth Park Nature Reserve, less than a mile from here as the crow flies.  This is first time red squirrels have been seen in the reserve for several years and it is more than two years since I saw one in my garden.

Then the bad news.  Twenty seconds after my first glimpse of a red squirrel and 20 yards away I saw an American grey and over the next few hundred yards in the same patch of woodland I saw several greys.  They took over in these woods and ousted the reds more than 10 years ago.

In recent years there have been concerted efforts to control the greys in and around Newcastle with limited success. Red squirrels are absent from most of England and we are on the front line of the battle between reds and greys. Generally the two species don't coexist for long but if greys can be controlled or removed the red squirrels can get re-established.  There continue to be sporadic reports of sightings of reds in and around the city so we are encouraged to keep up the efforts to support them.