End of year favourites - Aves (elsewhere)

I haven't taken as many bird photos this year as usual, probably because I have been distracted by other things such as dragonflies, bees and hornets.  Here are a few birds I did see.

Bird of the week - Rock pipit

This little bird is a common sight on walks along the coast near here.  It is a rock pipit (Anthus petrosus) and several were hunting for small invertebrates along the shoreline at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea this week.

This is a bird of rocky shorelines so it is found mostly in the north and west of the British Isles.  Its breeding range does extend to the North East coast here and in winter visiting birds from Scandinavia expand the range to most of the UK.

In Thomas Bewick's day pipits were considered as belonging to the lark family and he knew the rock pipit as a field lark.  This is his woodcut for A History of British Birds (1797).

Thomas Thorburn painted a rock pipit with a blue-headed wagtail in 1925.

Henrik Grönvold, a Danish artist, painted a pair of rock pipits in 1907.

You can listen to the BBC Radio 4 Tweet of the Day on rock pipit here.

Bird of the week - Rock pipit

The rock pipit is a shore bird but stays away from the waves, preferring to search around rocks and seaweed for insects to eat.  It is brown with a slightly olive tinge, perhaps more than is shown in these photos.

Because rock pipits like rocky shores it is easy to predict their distribution.  We are at the southern end of their breeding range on the eastern side of the country but some move farther south in winter.

In Thomas Bewick's day the pipits seem to have been classified with larks and he called it the field lark or rock lark.  He included it in his first book A History of British Birds (1797) and not in volume II which dealt with water birds.

I'm pretty sure this is the same bird as our rock pipit as he writes:

The rock pipit is Anthus petrosus.  In French it is Pipit maritime.  You can watch a BTO video on rock pipit identification here.  And listen to the BBC Radio 4 Tweet of the Day on rock pipit here.