Early Breeding Bird Surveys 2014

North West Zone: Thursday 24th

I'm not my shiniest at 5.30am, but the spring bird song along the River Mole corridor is well worth hauling out of bed for.

Tom F of Gatwick Greenspace Partnership leads the main bird surveys here, which we carry out four times a year. Last week it was the early breeding birds and we were hoping to pick up on the newly arrived summer migrants. Our first port of call was the North West Zone, closest to the runway...

The very start of our transect brought us the goods, with Swifts and Swallows overhead at Povey Cross. Over here the scrub, grassland and wetland produces warbler action in the form of Blackcap, Chiffchaff and Common Whitethroat. I got excited to hear the weird song of a Lesser Whitethroat, although its a shame it was all on its ownsome.

It seems like the wildflowers are peaking already, with Ragged Robin and Cowslip coming into their own...

A group of nodding Cowslip (Primula veris)

Ragged Robin is a pants name for such a lovely flower, but at least it has a fancy binomial 

(Lychnis flos-cuculi)

Earlier grasses are also coming into flower, as my violent hayfever can attest to. Above is Meadow Foxtail (Alopecurus pratensis)

Reed Bunting and Reed Warbler have begun setting up their territories in wetland scrub and reed beds. If you look closely, you can just about make out a brown splodge perched at the top of a reed stem (possibly only the 3rd worst photo of a male Reed Bunting ever taken).

 

This Reed Bunting song is from the awesome bird call website Xeno Canto. This species seems to have quite a regional variation, so it took a while to find a recording similar to those individuals I am hearing here (this one happens to have been recorded in Berlin, Germany).

In the rough grassland at the very end of the transect was a new bird for our survey - a group of Common Starling. They have always been a stone's throw away on the airfield, so perhaps it is just luck we saw them today.

This is the day's list for the NWZ:

1.       Stock Dove

2.       Wood Pigeon

3.       Swift

4.       Great Spotted Woodpecker

5.       Green Woodpecker

6.       Jay

7.       Magpie

8.       Jackdaw

9.       Carrion Crow

10.   Starling

11.   Swallow

12.   Great Tit

13.   Blue Tit

14.   Blackbird

15.   Song Thrush

16.   Robin

17.   Blackcap

18.   Chiffchaff

19.   Whitethroat

20.   Lesser Whitethroat

21.   Reed Warbler

22.   Goldfinch

23.   Chaffinch

24.   Bullfinch

25.   Reed Bunting

26.   Dunnock

27.   Wren

28.   Common buzzard

29.   Pheasant

30.   Mallard

31.   Moorhen

Land East of the Railway Line: Friday 25th

This morning was a bit duller and cooler after some refreshing overnight rain. Over on this side of the airport, we have more extensive ancient woodland as well as the larger water treatment ponds.

Tom F. setting a badger trail camera before the survey

I had left my camera on charge this morning (gahh), so resorted to using my camera phone instead. It doesn't cope so well with the low light levels and the pics have come out with a weird, ethereal glow to them...

Native Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

These white Bluebells are most likely our native type, but an occasional genetic mutation can result in the complete lack of pigment.

♪ Purple haze, all around... ♫

The Bluebells seem to be putting on an intense show this year, almost as if they are sensing impending pressure of future woodland environmental policy...
   The woodlands are alive with birds (as well as the occasional plane engine roar), so we have to make several stop whilst standing agape, trying to pick out the individual species. Wren, Robin, Dunnock, Great Tit and Blue Tit do a good job of trying to drown out the competition. The warblers have been setting up territory here too, with Chiffchaff and Blackcap in abundance.

I am doubling up our recording effort with a survey form I have created for iRecord, hopefully to help with speedier bird data entry. I put numbered markers onto a printed aerial map, then reference them next to our species list.

Moschatel or Town Hall Clock (Adoxa moschatellina) is a cute but often overlooked woodland flower

For me, the find of the day was a Willow Warbler in Goat Meadow. This is a new record for our Gatwick bird surveys and our 6th species of Warbler. The song has a lovely, mellow descending trill which shows on this sonogram...

This slightly made up for the fact that the regular Marsh Tits I had promised Tom had stood us up. 

   Other woodland niceties showed up towards the end of our transects, including Tree Creeper, Nuthatch, Great Spotted Woodpecker and Goldcrest. Barn Swallows have arrived in the last couple of weeks and they could be seen and heard hawking over the water treatment ponds.

A young Mug Tree

We finally tracked down our singing Song Thrush at the end of the transect, ruling over a group of squabbling Dunnocks in the Upper Picketts deadhedge. The final list was shorter than our usual average of 30, possibly due to the slightly cooler day, or perhaps some species are already busy nesting and have less time to sing.

LERL final list:

1. Stock Dove
2. Wood Pigeon
3. Great Spotted Woodpecker
4. Green Woodpecker
5. Jay
6. Magpie
7. Jackdaw
8. Carrion Crow
9. Swallow
10. Great Tit
11. Blue Tit
12. Coal Tit
13. Long-tailed Tit
14. Blackbird
15. Song Thrush
16. Robin
17. Goldcrest
18. Blackcap
19. Chiffchaff
20. Willow Warbler
21. Chaffinch
22. Dunnock
23. Wren
24. Treecreeper
25. Nuthatch

Roving Records - Land East of the Railway Line: 19/03/2014

Recently I've been really spoiled by warm and sunny weather, so I had to give myself a kick to get outside on this cool, blustery day.

Underside of a Mink: the colour is quite beautiful but the fur is rather oily in texture

On the way to the site, along the A23 was a grim but still an interesting find: a squashed American Mink (Neovison vison), which came off worse after meeting a car. I've seen plenty of tracks and droppings around our streams and rivers, but I've yet to see a live one. American Mink were brought in and farmed in the UK for their fur before it was banned in the '90s. Sadly this practice still goes on in European countries and the US. The descendants of the escapees here are an invasive species and voracious predators, thought to be at least partly responsible for the decline of the UK's Water Voles.
   . 

Scots Pine and Birch trees dominate the entrance of Upper Picketts Wood

Into Upper Picketts Wood and a colony of Jackdaws were making the most of the stiff breeze, leaping off the trees and being buffeted happily about. A group of Goldfinches high up in the Scots Pine were also singing lusitly, a sound which I normally associate with my housing estate.

The woodlands are really alive with bird song at the moment, in particular Wrens, Robins, Goldfinches, Great Tits and Chaffinches. Great-spotted Woodpeckers were drumming and a Green Woodpecker was 'yaffling' in the distance. I regularly hear a Marsh Tit around the entrance to Goat Meadow and have occasionally seen a pair flitting around together. I really like its shrill 'pit-choo' calls, which can feel like a greeting, though in actuality is telling me 'where to go'.

I was sneaking a look under the reptile refugia around the meadow, when something which looked like a massive rubber snake draped over a branch caught my eye...

Refugia at the Grass Snake boulevard

A rubber snake

It was in fact a very real and pretty massive Grass Snake! It's close to a meter long and I've seen this big ol' female in the same spot last year. I was hoping she wouldn't mind our rennovating her brash pile, which was breaking down and getting a bit sparse, but it seems to have gone down nicely.

Grass Snake (Natrix natrix)

On to checking the hedgehog tracking tunnels, kindly lent by one of our Ecology volunteers George. We are hoping to get some indication of Hedgehog activity on our sites...

A Hedgehog tracking tunnel - corrugated plastic with an ink pad and pieces of plain paper at either end

They were baited with spam and tinned sweetcorn, as like some humans, most mammals don't seem to be that fussy! After just one night, all the food was gone and left behind were lots of little inky mammal tracks. Sadly no hedgehog prints yet, although it was probably a bit of a long shot.

These tiny tracks are most likely from Field Voles and Common Shrews

Halfway through checking the tunnels, I spotted two bees hawking over the grass... I had a quick sweep of my net and one got away, but I snagged this cute little fella - a mining bee of the Andrena genus.

Male Andrena spp. As well as two large compound eyes, you can see the three ocelli (simple eyes) on the top of his head which assist with light detection and navigation

I was told it is probably the Small Sallow Mining-bee (Andrena praecox), one of the earlier species to be out and about. Male Andrenas can all look pretty similar so I would need to use an identification key to be sure, but as I am pretty tight for time, I let it go.

He was released on Blackthorn flowers, though it might have preferred a Willow catkin

Finally, under the reptile refugia I am also finding many of these little click beetles...

Elaterida is the Click Beetle family and consists of 73 species in the British Isles

At some point I will have a crack at using some invertebrate identification keys, but right now I am on a steep learning curve in terms of Airport and Aerodrome Ecology, so it is on the back burner!