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Rachel Carson Day
Conor Mark Jameson writes …
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The RSPB holds its annual weekend for members at York University each spring during half-term. The students are away and the wildfowl own the campus. Members (and staff and volunteers present) are treated to a range of stimulating talks and activities, guaranteed to recharge the batteries, and remind us what multi-tentacled beast is this organisation, grappling with challenges on all sides. Most of all you leave York with the strong sense that there is hope yet for saving nature. This year I was lucky enough to be invited to give a talk that I call Silent Spring Revisited – Rachel Carson’s legacy.
As I did a bit of last-minute adjustment I realised the significance of the date. Tuesday 14th April was the day in 1964 when something very significant happened that is much less well remembered than Silent Spring itself, published just over a year earlier.
On that spring morning, Rachel Carson died. It comes as a surprise to people when I tell them this, just as the event itself came as a shock even to many of those who knew well the naturalist, scientist, author and campaigner. They didn’t know she’d been ill, and they didn’t know because she hadn’t told them. She thought that knowledge of her condition would be used against her by her opponents, deniers of the widespread harmful effects of indiscriminate pesticide use.
In fact Rachel Carson had been battling cancer and a succession of illnesses for a large part of the four and a half years it took her to research and write Silent Spring. Arthritis required her at times to use a wheelchair.
Forty-nine years on, this anniversary Sunday morning fittingly brought strong, mild blustery winds from the south and west. With them came the long awaited and much delayed spring migrant birds from the south, where they had been backing up around the Mediterranean and beyond. Chiffchaffs at last were calling from the bare treetops among the halls of residence on a misty Yorkshire dawn.
The turbulent air also encouraged our Scandinavian visitors to head once again north and east. Redwings streamed overhead and out towards the sea, and we craned our necks seeking our first glimpse of swallows arriving to replace them. Someone reported seeing a waxwing and a willow warbler in the same hedgerow – an unusual collision of arrivistes and the departing. But it wasn’t till I’d made the journey home afterwards, south by train against this general flow of returning nature, that I found my first swallows. There were three of them, surfing the wind over the village a few hundred metres from the house, by way of welcome. They’ve made it again, as always oblivious to all that’s going on below them, in our increasingly uncertain world.
Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s passing. It would be fitting to mark the occasion then not with a minute’s silence, nor even with a minute’s applause, but with a minute’s birdsong, and other springtime sounds from nature. Perhaps we might even officially designate it Rachel Carson Day.
People wherever they are might then listen for the birds, and take a moment to recall Rachel Carson’s determination, courage and sacrifice, in the face of powerful opposition, in raising the alarm about the danger of biocide misuse. She didn’t live to find out what came next. She did this work not for her own benefit, but for those who would follow. This is one hero we mustn’t allow to be unsung.
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Conor’s book, Silent Spring Revisited, is now out in paperback.
Phantom
Conor Mark Jameson describes his meeting with the elusive Goshawk…
Berlin. Late February. As chill, and still and drab as all the Cold War, spy thriller clichés. I am here with ‘Altenkamp!’. That’s how Rainer answers his hands-free, as we drive to the fourth and last of our destinations this afternoon, here in the east of the sprawling city. This is Rainer’s ‘precinct’. This is where he does his stake-outs, stalks his quarry, makes his notes. We aren’t looking for dissidents, however. Those days are gone. We are looking for goshawks.
Improbably, we are in a swing park. And not a very big one. It makes a change from the first three venues of my whistle-stop tour – cemeteries. We found evidence of goshawks in all three – plucking sites, nests, tantalising goshawk calls.
The park is dotted with people. The quiet is punctured by the cries of children and small dogs. There is a tennis court, a roundabout and swings. Mallards loaf on a tiny duck pond, ice still intact around its muddy, scummy rim. It doesn’t look promising, all this. I’m still stuck in my image of the goshawk as a bird of remote and expansive conifer woodland, where they remain strangely invisible.
The trees here, however, are towering in places. In one, Rainer points out a gos nest from last year. Further on, we spot what must be this year’s: another huge, dark cone against the grey, in the highest fork of a beech. And I notice dark feathers on the ground. They catch my eye because some are still stirring in the faintest breeze. Not
wet and stuck to the grass like in the graveyards. Fresh. There is a trail of them. And I notice downy feathers too, and some of these are in fact still airborne.
I absently follow these round in the air with my finger (I realise now this probably looked like the exaggerated, gormless gesture of someone in pantomime). Without realising it, I am looking up open-mouthed and pointing at the source of this feather trail: a hooded crow, prone on the branch of an oak, ten feet above our heads, in the firm grip of a juvenile female goshawk.
It is a hyper-real scenario. The phantom of the forest, the grey ghost, the bird you normally see well only in books or glass cases – glass-eyed – now close, animate, fiery-eyed, moving, pulling and tearing, twitching as she dips her head. Purposeful, focused, alert and aware, yet somehow not really looking at us. Looking beyond us, or through us; as though maybe we are now the ghosts, the phantoms. A little disconcerting. Haunting. And quite amazing.
‘Don’t point at her!’ hisses Rainer. Of course, I immediately feel like the gauche, rooky cop, liable to give the game away in his enthusiasm after a prolonged investigation that has led finally to the clinching encounter. I pull my hand away abruptly.
‘We need to not look at her – she might not like it,’ he whispers. ‘We should take turns to look over, while talking to each other – like this…’ As he demonstrates the ruse, I sense that Rainer, even after 15 years of study, is nearly as excited as me. Not old and cynical like the veteran cop of cliché. In a way, I’m also gratified to confirm that I can still have feelings like this myself. I’m like the kid that once was me, seeing my first buzzard, up close.
We attempt a rather awkward, stilted semi-conversation while I at least am struggling to disguise my excitement, stealing glances at this mythical bird, come to life. The goshawk – ‘the bird you know is there, because you do not see it’, as they say in rural Germany – plain as day, relaxed as a pet, more beautiful than books, pictures, films and of course taxidermy can ever hope to emulate – is right here before us: in a city centre swing park.
It becomes steadily clear that she has not batted a mad, raptor eyelid. This is confirmed when a pram-pushing couple stop immediately below the branch and, as one, look up at her and, yes, point. Perhaps they too have noticed the crow’s stomach on the path, discarded by the dining hawk with the bulging crop. Or maybe they just couldn’t miss her.
She is 26-inches long, lean, muscular, saffron-tinted and streaked with chocolate-coloured arrowheads. She has that goshawk glare – looks invincible. Perhaps she is. Perhaps the routinely persecuted goshawk has at last found real sanctuary, so close to us now no one could find it in their heart to hate it, far less shoot it, or trap it, or poison it, or put it in a glass case. In Berlin at least, the goshawk is now out of the woods, and back in our lives, and no longer considered a threat to the state.
The goshawk, after finishing her meal. Photo by Rainer Altenkamp.
This story first appeared in BBC Wildlife Magazine, as the winning entry of the 2010 Nature Writer of the Year competition.
Looking for the Goshawk, the full story of what happened next, is out now.
Osprey returns to snow and fog
Tim Mackrill, author of The Rutland Water Ospreys has some news…
Picture the scene. It’s early March on a West African beach and 03(97) – Rutland’s most successful breeding Osprey – is tucking into a Needlefish which he has just caught. He glances up to watch a fishing boat drift past, a mixed flock of terns alights nearby and a Pied Kingfisher zips past, calling noisily. The early morning sun is warming the beach; by the middle of the day the temperature will have reached more than 30 degrees. Things couldn’t be more tranquil.
Fast forward a few weeks and the scene is very different. Yesterday 03 returned to his nest at Site B to be greeted by a blizzard and thick fog. Yes, you read that right, 03 is back in Rutland!
The weather of the past week – not just in the UK, but in much of France – meant we were expecting many of our summer visitors, Ospreys included, to be delayed by a few days. 03, though, has confounded this by returning two days earlier than either he, or any of the other Rutland birds, has ever done.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Our recent satellite tracking studies have demonstrated the extraordinary migratory ability of Ospreys. For instance, unlike most other birds of prey, they don’t rely on thermals to aid their migration. In his urgency to get back to the nest where he has raised 27 chicks since 2001, 03 obviously just powered on through the worst that the European ‘spring’ could throw at him.
Once back at the nest Sunday morning – he may even have arrived on Saturday evening – 03 set about rebuilding his nest. It wasn’t long, though, before heavy snow forced him to take shelter on the nest tree. A couple of hours later the nest was shrouded in thick fog. The contrast with his wintering grounds could hardly have been more pronounced.
03’s early arrival will ensure that he has no competition for his long-established nest, but it is likely to make fishing difficult for a few days. The temperature is forecast to drop below freezing most nights this week, meaning fish in the reservoir, and 03’s other regular fishing spots, will retreat towards the bottom of the water column, making them more difficult to catch that usual. However, many Scandinavian Ospreys return to find snow at their nests each spring, so we know that 03 will be fine. If a little colder than usual.
With 03 back in Rutland, we wonder who will be next? Last year 5R(04) returned to the Manton Bay nest on 19th March. So keep a close eye on the webcam over the next few days! Even better, why not come and pay us a visit at Rutland Water. The Lyndon Visitor Centre is open 7 days a week.
Read the whole story of the successful rentroduction of the Ospreys to England in:
The big Bloomsbury bird race
Marianne Taylor shares the drama of the bird race…
First light on a January morning, hot tea and bacon sandwiches in Nigel’s conservatory. There is a cheery babble of conversation around me but I’m not joining in, because I’m staring at a bird feeder. The birds come and go like lightning. I keep my binoculars up at my eyes, aimed at the feeder, it’s the only way. Then, sneaking in among the colourful Blue and Great Tits, a little mousy bird with black cap and bib. ‘Marsh Tit! On the feeder now!’ I yelp and everyone snaps round to look. There are congratulatory noises and I scrawl its name down on a list already more than a dozen strong. We’ve got what we were waiting for, now it’s time to go.
Foxes, Fairlight
We follow tight, high-hedged country lanes towards the coast. In and out of Hastings town, then eastwards to Fairlight. We park up and scramble across a squashy mudbath of a field, over the pulled-down barbed wire to the crumbling cliff edge. A sheer drop and a wide, still expanse of English Channel lies before us. Nigel scopes the sea, the rest of us watch a pair of Foxes as they gingerly explore the scene of last year’s rock-fall over to our right. Out on the water bob rafts of Great Crested Grebes, among them the odd diver and scoter. Fulmars hang-glide over the tiny wave crests. Any moment now a Peregrine or Raven might round the Cliffside and give us a jaw-dropping flypast. But we have limited time and lots more to do.
Cormorant, Pett Level
Pett Level is just a few miles along. Here we look out across miles of intensely green, soaking wet pasture, interspersed with shallow pools that teem with wildfowl. The ecstatic whistled whoops of the Wigeons predominate, the soft purrs of the Teals provide a backing track. Lapwings and Curlews busily patrol the fields, further out a family of White-fronted Geese graze alongside their commoner Greylag cousins. Nigel finds two Peregrines having their mid-morning break on a picturesque wooden gate. The list grows and grows.
Rook, Pett Level
At Dungeness, we find a gleaming white male Smew among the Pochards on the ARC pit, and in the willow scrub there’s a split-second, heart-stopping glimpse of a Firecrest. A Cetti’s Warbler sings from some hiding place or other, rich, vibrantly fruity notes that sound out of place here in this chilly shingle wilderness. Our six sets of walking boots scrunch along the pathway back to the car.
Glaucous Gull, Dungeness
Post-lunch, the light evaporating fast, we’re gathered at the end of a row of fishing boats, watching a great swirl of gulls. Among them flies a single Glaucous Gull, a great barrel-shaped bird, its wings tipped white rather than black like the others. Kittiwakes are commuting to and fro along the shoreline. Further out, there’s a melee of seabirds – Guillemots and Razorbills rubbing shoulders with grebes on the water, Gannets circling above. Once in a while a Gannet folds itself shut like an umbrella and freefalls headfirst into the water. I imagine the undersea chase, the Gannet gulping down its fish prey and fighting its way back to the surface. We head back to the Dungeness RSPB reserve.
Kittiwake, Dungeness
In near darkness, we’re all getting cold and ready to head for somewhere indoors. But Nigel stands on a hill of shingle til the last, watching and hoping for the Bittern that would bring our day list to 86. He doesn’t see it. Instead, a Water Rail squeals from the reedbeds, and far away a Sparrowhawk is hunting over the fields, hoping for one last meal before nightfall. It’s the last to join our list – 87 species in one January day.
Marianne Taylor is the author of:
Kenyan delights
Happy New Year! To launch us in to 2013, we have a post from Steve Spawls on some of the amazing wildlife you can see in Kenya.
Once in a while my wife lets me off the leash to go and look for snakes, usually in Kenya, on the strict proviso that I do some serious field work and don’t stay at any fancy lodges or hotels; which would make her jealous. So I went to Kenya at half-term, and spent a couple of days with Glenn Mathews, my co-author and long time friend, at his smallholding on the southern edge of Nairobi National Park. It’s a lovely place; you sit on his veranda and look across the Mbagathi River straight into the park. On a good day you might see a rhino or two. Glenn’s plot slopes down to the river, and the bush is thick there.
Sunbird tapping at the window
A stroll by the river is hazardous. It’s not like walking on Buxton Heath; there you might see a roe deer, or hare, and an adder or two in the right season. And yellowhammers, always. But at Glenn’s place, the thick bush often provides shelter for buffalo, and you don’t want to startle them. I always sing or whistle when going through the riverside bush, which scares the birds, of course, until you can find a vantage point and sit quietly. The first morning, after being awoken by an irritable variable sunbird banging on my window – he wanted to fight with his reflection – I went down to the river. I was sitting there, watching a gymnogene on her nest when Glenn’s son Jesse spotted a young rock python and shouted for me to come. I lost my balance on the slope, covered myself with mud and by the time I arrived the python had slipped into the river. So back to Glenn’s house to clean up, and I decided to go for a walk higher up along the ridge, not forgetting to spray my legs with insect repellent. In the grass there are pepper ticks, which are really tick larvae, and if you get these tiny mites on your skin they get into the pores and cause intense itching. A stroll along the ridge produced a real gem. It’s always the way, when you walk in a wild place. As I pottered through the grassy savanna, among the low whistling-thorn trees, a nightjar suddenly fluttered up from under my feet. Usually, when you flush a nightjar, it floats away on silent wings, flies off thirty or forty yards and settles. You can try to stalk it again, if you can spot it. Their camouflage is superb and if they think you haven’t seen them, they will sit tight. But this nightjar didn’t respond normally. She squawked as she got up, plumped down five yards away and began limping away, trailing a wing and hissing at me. She was trying to drag me away, which meant she had young nearby. I took a couple of pictures of her and looked around carefully, but could not see the chicks. So I walked away, sat down thirty or so years and waited. She didn’t come back, so I made a little cairn of stones and went back to the house for some coffee with Glenn and Karen.
I came back an hour later, and approached my cairn slowly. This time the mother nightjar tried a different technique; she shuffled off her nest very quietly and began to creep away. I saw her as she was shuffling off. I sat down, and after a few minutes she crept back, into a patch of grass. Then I approached obliquely, and eventually, after staring for a good five minutes, saw her blink an eye. And she had two chicks, right in front of her. I got a couple of photographs, and then backed off.
Montane Nightjar or Dusky Nightjar?
I find Nightjars are tough birds to identify. I can tell a few by their calls – the freckled nightjar, often on stony hills in Africa, has a squawk like a little dog, but all nightjars look very similar, although the males of two species develop magnificent wing projections that enable identification. I sent my pictures to Nik Borrow, an expert African ornithologist, and he said either Montane Nightjar or Dusky Nightjar. But not even he was certain. However, Nigel Redman copied the pictures on to a friend who specialises in nightjars, Nigel Cleere, and he reckoned it was dusky. But when you struggle with a particular group of birds, it’s nice to know that even the experts are sometimes unsure.
Steve is the co-author of Kenya: A Natural History.
Find out more about Nightjars:
A Turkey is not just for Christmas
Artist and author, Celia Lewis shares her experience of hatching and keeping Turkeys.
I’m lucky enough to own a small incubator. It’s the most fascinating piece of equipment that does the work of the hen or whatever bird’s eggs you’ve chosen to hatch. As turkeys come into the Ducks & Geese book I thought I would hatch a few to really get to know them.
Firstly one must find someone willing to sell their eggs – google to the rescue and although September is late in the year for turkeys to still be laying I easily find someone willing to post me 6 eggs. Into the incubator they go, it is programmed to stay at the correct temperature, and rolls the eggs slowly backwards and forwards to mimic the mother bird who would turn her eggs several times a day. All you have to do is make sure the humidity is correct and fill up the water containers when necessary.
It is a long wait – 4 weeks in the case of turkeys but at last the day comes, often preceeded by cheeping from inside the egg before it even cracks. The chick pecks its way out and is dry and standing within minutes. All this you can watch through the lid of the incubator – a great time waster. Patience is required as its very important at this stage not to let the humidity or temperature fall so one has to resist the temptation to take the lid off for a better look.
Once all the eggs have hatched they can be transferred either to a broody hen or under a lamp. I was lucky and had a broody that I’d settled into one corner of a stable. Four eggs hatched and were soon settled with their new mother and all seemed to be going well. However a week later I found the largest chick dead. The only explanation I could come up with was that the hen had trodden on it by mistake – down to three.
When the chicks were large enough I put the hen back in the run with her friends – I intended the turkeys to be free range in the garden reckoning that when full size they would be more than a match for a fox. They grew and grew, 2 male and one female and eventually I allowed them out of their temporary run and they took to roosting high up in an oak tree. They stayed by the hen run (occasionally flying in as I think they were convinced they were hens having been brought up by one) and became charming friendly birds. However, you’ve probably guessed, one morning only two came to greet me and I soon discovered that a fox had indeed managed to catch one and carry it away – incredible, these were full size birds standing a metre high and heavy.
Now there were only 2 left and for their own safety they had to join the hens in Fort Knox aka the hen run. Turkeys are delightful birds, not beautiful perhaps but surprisingly gentle – I don’t think they will end up on the Christmas dinner table.
Celia’s beautiful painting of a Bourbon Red Stag
Find out more about keeping Turkeys in Celia’s book:
Celia is also the author of:
Silent Spring Revisited
I had the rare honour of being invited to give a talk about my first book, Silent Spring Revisited, at the Buxton Literature Festival. I have several talks lined up, but this was the first I’ve done. The journey through the Derbyshire Peaks was pierced by glorious sunshine, evening shadows spearing across a landscape by freshening rain, cut hay drying in the warm upland breezes.
Buxton retains all of its Victorian spa town elegance, and crowds milled in the gardens and outdoor cafes. A particular highlight was meeting Joanna Lumley outside the Opera House. Knowing her liking for birds and track-record as an environmentalist, I tried to lure her along to my talk. Alas she was much in demand and had other bookings.
Meeting Joanna Lumley at Buxton
I figured the easiest way to structure the talk would be around a few selected readings from the book, to give a flavour of its content and structure, and to fill the gaps between with discussion of Rachel Carson’s life and legacy, where my inspiration for the book had come from (an unlikely source – The Peregrine by J. A. Baker), and why I’ve taken the approach to writing it that I have.
Fifty years on from the publication of Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring, my book is a tribute to her vision and courage, and an attempt to answer the questions: was Rachel Carson right? Did we listen? Year by year since then I chart the major milestones in environmentalism, in the UK, USA and beyond, and the fate of the birds and the dawn chorus. Around this I have woven personal anecdote and other political and cultural events and milestones, to place the movement in its wider historical context.
I’m quite soft-spoken, apparently, and the sound man told me I would need to pro-ject clearly in this large, hotel function suite, with its air-con and absorbent upholstery. His message was reinforced at an early stage but one elderly onlooker. So pro-ject I did. It was hot in there, and as I held the book at the lectern, and essentially shouted out the chosen passages, and in particular the section on the 1967 Torrey Canyon disaster, with its images of burning seas, it dawned on me I might look and sound like a fire and brimstone preacher. And preach is what I’ve never wanted to do, when writing. I always adopted what I hope is a fireside manner rather than a pulpit one. That I was mopping sweat from my brow may have enhanced the undesired effect. I didn’t allow the image of the seabird drenched in crude oil to linger on the screen behind me for long.
Writing, for me, is about finding your inner voice. Bill Shankly once said that if you speak softly, people will work harder to hear you. I’ve always wished that he was right about this. It seemed to work for him. In that sweltering suite I made sure to read some of the more comic extracts, the part of me that has to laugh, although I fear a little for our future. But in any case for future talks a more intimate venue, a comfy chair, an evening time-slot might be more suited to me, the book’s style. Perhaps any book’s. Most aren’t written to be read aloud, after all.
The questions from the audience at the end were spot on, as you’d expect from a literary crowd, the feedback encouraging. One lady even called it the most thought-provoking talk she’d been to, although I’d “have to work on the presentation style – but that will come,” she added, reassuringly.
Buxton also made me realise that one of the loose threads running through SSR is the parallel I’ve often noted between environmentalism and other, more recognised, faiths. And that environmentalism, if not by name, may be a common subtext to all, or most. Is it in actual fact a new religion? Or is it perhaps the oldest? Perhaps I’ll throw that one open the next time.
Conor Mark Jameson
Silent Spring Revisited is published by Bloomsbury in hardback, price £16.99
Finding birds in weird weather
As the British summer continues (more rain forecast this week…) guest blogger Marianne Taylor writes on birding whatever the weather.
Are you a fair-weather birder? It’s OK, you can own up, you’re among friends. Bad weather, of which we’ve seen far too much lately, isn’t just off-putting to us humans, it can also have a profound effect on bird behaviour. Some species become very difficult to see on rainy or windy days, but for others, the arrival of a low-pressure weather front is the cue to get out and start searching.
A bad hair day for a Tufted Duck – most birds sensibly seek shelter from strong winds.
Cold, rainy, windy days make life difficult for large, soaring birds that use thermals (rising warm air) to gain lift. There’s not much point scanning the skies for high-flying raptors on days like this – it’s too energetically expensive for the birds to reach a good height without the help of the thermals, so they tend to sit out the bad weather.
Calm, still days are best for seeing reedbed birds like Reed Warblers
Small birds on migration in both spring and autumn are also likely to go to ground in bad weather – they’re liable to become exhausted and possibly blown off course so when conditions are dire they will often take a pitstop and spend the time feeding up, waiting for the weather to improve before continuing their journeys. This means that bad-weather days are good times to look for them, especially in coastal areas. They’ll be in the bushes or on the ground, depending on species – in spring some of the males will often sing, even though they’re just stopping off with no intention of staying on to breed.
Swifts will travel many miles to find good feeding conditions – the abundance of flying insects is very weather-dependent.
A Herring Gull making a splash. Most seabirds can cope with some quite rough conditions but tend to head closer inshore during storms.
Some of our most interesting birds are best looked for on the most uninviting days. Spring storms with easterly winds are perfect conditions to send migrating Black Terns our way, the tired birds often homing in on inland water bodies to feed. Autumn gales push scarce seabirds like Leach’s Petrels and Sabine’s Gulls close inshore and sometimes even upriver.
Warming air on fine mornings encourages birds of prey like Red Kites to take to the air – attracting the attention of mobbing corvids.
It’s not all about rain, wind and gloom though. Fine, warm days in late spring – and we’ll be enjoying some of those soon with any luck – can be great for birdwatching, with a chance of rarities like Black Kites, Red-rumped Swallows and Bee-eaters overshooting their normal breeding grounds and reaching Britain. Long summer evenings with a pleasant light breeze are great for watching Barn Owls, and still days encourage reedbed birds like Bearded Tits to show themselves, rather than lurking low in the reeds as they do on windy days. Even snow and a freeze can assist with bird-finding, as water birds concentrate on patches of clear water, and skulkers like Bitterns and Water Rails are more likely to venture into the open.
A cold snap may bring unusual wildfowl to any unfrozen waters, like this party of Bewick’s Swans at a Kent reservoir.
So, whatever the weather’s doing there are birds out there to find, but finding out a bit about different species’ habits will help you pick the likeliest targets and best strategy for a successful day.
If you are interested in this, you might like:
Marianne’s new book
The happy denouement
Conor Mark Jameson completes the Cheerps blog trilogy.
First thing in the morning I confronted the task of working out how to get Cheerps back in his rightful place. I got the ladder out and climbed up alongside the nest hole. From the side, I could see a sibling sparrow’s head poking out, yelling encouragement at no doubt frazzled parents. The head turned unsteadily on a scrawny neck, got me in focus, fell silent, and slowly – comically – retracted. Looking from the front of the crevice I could see it, as though at a port-hole, like a Gary Larsson cartoon figure, peering, wide mouth now firmly shut, head still wobbling. To my intense relief I was able ease a slate up and gently return Cheerps to the straw bundle, sending the other occupants scuttling to the back of the box, hidden among straw and chicken feathers.
We know from research that late broods of sparrows are not very productive. By July the birds often struggle to find enough to eat. It certainly struck me, watching the parents come and go at the nest hole, how infrequently they visited, and how little they appeared to bring, especially compared to how much my foster sparrow has been able to pack away while under my supervision.
I’m hopeful I will still have my unruly band of local sparrows visiting for birdseed and crumbs through the winter. Maybe Cheerps will be one of their number. One thing I can be sure of, however, now that I’ve secured the nest site on the loft-side, is that there won’t be any more like him falling into the house next summer. All being well, future sparrow feeding duties will be a little less ‘hands-on’.
Tweet your questions tohttps://twitter.com/#!/BB_Specialistfor the interview with Conor on Monday at 12.
Bringing up baby – part 2
After yesterday’s cliffhanger, Conor Mark Jameson takes up the tale of Cheerrps…
My foundling sparrow looks surprisingly under-developed, semi-naked, perhaps a week old and only half way to fledging, with bare patches of skin and rudimentary feathers beginning to show. Nidifugous, they call it. Its bulbous eyes are partially open, glinting between crescent lids. To rescue it from the airing cupboard I had to remove my watch and squeeze my hand through a narrow gap, using a screwdriver to manoeuvre the chick into a place from which I could pluck it, as gently as possible, between two outstretched fingers.
Here, I had better make clear the difference between a nestling bird and a fledgling bird. I’ve had fledgling sparrows in the house before, and I put them straight back outside. One I was able to corner on an upstairs window-sill, and simply drop out of the window, to minimise its distress from being handled, and to show its parents where it was and what was happening. As I captured a male house sparrow hovered a few inches from the window pane, chirping abuse at me. All the thanks you get for letting them nest in the roof. I dunno…
A nestling is a bird that belongs in the nest (there’s a clue in the name). It isn’t yet ready for life outside the nest, as it won’t have the muscle development to hold itself upright, or the feather development to keep itself warm. Mine falls very definitely into the latter category.
This sparrow is slightly older than Cheerps
So now what? You’ve got a ravenous little stomach on your hands, all mouth and naked thighs, it’s 10.30 pm, there’s no way of popping it back in its nest (trust me on this, I’ve had a look in the loft). So I’ve soaked some scone and begun poking this mush gently into its gullet with the end of a teaspoon. After several dollops, in return it shuffles around, pokes its rear end in the air and offers me a dropping, or a foecal sac, as it’s known, which my fingers, it turns out, are not delicate enough to transport without splitting. Welcome to parenthood.
Half a dozen dollops of the mush later, the cheerping subsides and it’s time for lights out, shoebox closed.
Cheerps greets me first thing the next day. I have worked out a plan to try putting Cheerps (this is his name, and I have decided, for the purposes of this narrative, that it is a he) back in the nest, but I’m not going to have time to do the necessary research on this on a workday. I therefore have to take him to work with me, and the box of muffled cheerps sits discreetly by my desk. At least I think it’s discrete, but curious colleagues converge from all corners of the building. One leaves quickly, saying she might cry…Conservationists really ought not to be so flaky.
I pop to The Lodge shop for mealworms, which I thought would be more nutritious than wet scone – not that Cheerps is showing any sign of losing his appetite for that. He makes short work of the mealworms.
I have a book on my shelves called Sold for a Farthing, the wartime story of Clarence, an adopted house sparrow. I consult it for some tips on sparrow rearing, and to remind myself of what I might be taking on if I can’t find a way home for my lodger. Clarence lived with his owner for 12 years, treated her bed as his, and attacked anyone who came near it…
Don’t forget to tweet your questions for Conor to @BB_Specialist this weekend.
Jim
Julie
Nigel
Vicky
Jasmine
