Nest box camera update 8 - One week on

It has been a week since four of the five eggs hatched.  The fifth remained unhatched.  The chicks have grown from tiny floppy pink things hardly able to hold up their heads to be several times larger with a first covering of feathers.

They now make a soft cheeping sound but I don't think they can yet open their eyes.  The parents are feeding them very regularly, mostly with caterpillars.

  You can see the unhatched egg in this video, which gives a good idea of how much they have grown.

Sometimes the father doesn't seem to be able to decide which chick deserves the food.



Bird of the week - Tree sparrow

The tree sparrow is Passer montanus which is an odd name, presumably meaning mountain sparrow.  It is a handsome bird and is locally common (e.g. in my garden) but nationally is red listed.

Tree sparrows have taken over at least half a dozen boxes in the garden and others are nesting in holes in trees.  They like to lay claim to their box by sitting on the roof and cheeping.

Some are still collecting nesting material while others have fairly mature chicks.  One brood at least has fledged already.  They can have two or three broods in a season.

Tree sparrows enjoy a dust bath on a warm afternoon such as today.

Tree sparrow numbers declined catastrophically in the 1970s and 1980s and they are now absent from large parts of the south and west of the country.

The BTO Bird Atlas shows that the population in the north has increased recently.

Read more about tree sparrows here.  Listen to the BBC Radio 4 Tweet of the Day on tree sparrows here.

Breeding Bird Survey

2015 is my tenth year of taking part in the BTO Breeding Bird Survey (BBS).  My 1km square is NY8274, halfway between Simonburn and Stonehaugh on the edge of the Wark Forest.  It contains mostly rough grassland and bog and there are no trees or shrubs.  One  farm track, one stone wall and a couple of stone sheepfolds are the only distinguishing features.  You can see in the map which are the boggy bits (most!).

The survey requires two visits a year to count the birds, one in May and one in June.  I start at 0700 and walk the first 1 km transect north to south, recording all the birds seen either side of the transect in 5 sectors as shown below.  Then I walk the second transect south to north.  And then it is time for coffee and a bacon sandwich.

These photos show the terrain.  At first glance you might not expect there to be any birds.

This is the wall.

This is one of the sheepfolds.

This is the "stone circle" marked on the map.  It's not quite Stonehenge.  I wonder who built it, and when, and why.

The average count is 8 or 9 species, about half the number I would see at home in the same time.  However, the commonest bird here is a skylark, followed by meadow pipit and curlew so the birds are very different from those I see at home.  Less common sightings have been stonechat, reed bunting, red grouse, grasshopper warbler, snipe and peregrine.  The survey also allows recordings of mammals.  I rarely see any but this time did record a brown hare.

The survey is of birds not nests or eggs so I don't look for nests but I do very occasionally stumble across one.  This is a meadow pipit nest to show how well concealed it is, followed by two set of meadow pit eggs to show the colour variation.

The one time I found a curlew nest was by almost treading on the sitting curlew and I didn't have a camera.  Not a mistake I'll make again.

It is interesting to visit the same patch at the same time of year and my small amount of data contribute to the survey. Last year over 2800 volunteers submitted data from around 3600 1km squares to the BBS.  Read more about the BBS here.

More miners and cuckoos

I paid another visit to the Spetchells, the WW2 chalk spoil at Prudhoe, looking for mining bees and found far more than I had even hoped for.  As before, the most common bee was the female Andrena nigroaenea (Buffish mining bee)

 but there were very few males.

This female made the mistake of trying the wrong nest hole.

Here is the rightful owner, her face covered in chalk.

I also found my first female Andrena cineraria (Ashy mining bee).

And this is the male.

And my first Andrena haemorrhoa (Orange-tailed mining bee).

This one shows how she carries the pollen.

Then there was this bee which I think is a female Halictus rubicundus (Orange-legged furrow bee).

There were far more Nomada goodeniana cuckoo bees than last time.  This one is sniffing out a nest hole with her antennae.  She stayed like this for more than a minute before deciding not to enter.  Usually they scan for no more than a second before moving on.

This one beat a rapid retreat from the nest hole, perhaps having met the owner halfway down.

I also found another Nomada bee which I think is N. signata.  It is said to be a cleptoparasite of Andrena fulva (tawny mining bee) but I haven't found any of those yet.  Maybe it targets other Andrena bees as well.

This tiny bee is about half the size of the others and is another cuckoo, a Sphecodes bee (Blood bee) - there are 16 British species which are difficult to tell apart so I won't even try.  They parasitise Andrena and Halictid bees.  It occurs to me that, as well as cheating the host bees, cuckoo bees cheat the flowers because they drink the nectar but don't help with pollination - they don't collect pollen and are smooth rather than hairy so it won't stick to them.  I suppose it works for them and they can get away with it.

Also in evidence was a bee-fly (Bombylius major), another parasite of solitary bees.

All the photos above were taken with a macro lens and ring flash.  The photography is a challenge as it is low down (I get chalk all over my knees) but mainly because the bees move quickly.  They hunt around for the right hole and then dive in.  I also tried a 300mm telephoto lens in natural light and it gives reasonably good results, certainly good enough for identification in these Andrena nigroaenea and A. cineraria pictures.  For most things though I'll stick to the macro lens.

I guess the reason the bees don't hang around is that like most flights they are their most vulnerable when coming in to land, although in their case the hazard is predators, mainly birds.  This carrion crow was running around catching bees. Although it was some way off you can make out the bees in its beak.

Quite an amazing variety of bees living side by side.  If you can improve on any of the identifications please leave a message.  To help me with identification I have been using BWARS, Steven Falk's astonishing Flickr site and Ed Phillips' image gallery.