A bright start to spring

On these bright, late February mornings, there is a real sense that spring is in the air. No longer is it just the wistful tones of the Robins that punctuate the still chill air. Instead, other songsters have joined the chorus: the ‘thrice-repeated’ notes of Song Thrush, the ‘teacher-teacher’ of Great Tit and the rich warbling song of Blackbird have been added over recent weeks. Just last week it was the ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’ song of Yellowhammer that was added to my morning walks through the mixed-age plantations.

Yellowhammers seem to do well in the younger-aged compartments of conifers, making the most of the snag lines of old stumps that run in parallel lines across the recently replanted blocks. Throughout the spring and early summer months, their delightful song can be heard and individual birds can be watched back to neat nests tucked within the grassy cover that sits alongside the snag lines.

For me, as a child, the Yellowhammer was a farmland bird inhabiting the richer hedgerows of the Sussex borderlands. It was a similar story when I first arrived in Norfolk; living in the north of the county it was the winter flocks on game cover that I most remember. However, when I moved to the Brecks the Yellowhammer became a bird of the forest, favouring the open areas of clearfell for breeding and then moving onto the surrounding farmland in winter, where we might catch them in our nets, set for licensed bird ringing.

The Yellowhammer is a bunting, its robust bill an indication of its preference for larger seeds and grains, much like its relative the Reed Bunting. During the breeding season, however, insects and other invertebrates dominate the diet. Birds can be spotted feeding on open ground and then watched back to their nests. The nest itself often has a ‘doorstep’, a little gathering of material that protrudes at the front of the nest. Tucked within the nest cup will be the eggs, an off-white colour often tinged with purple, onto which are finely-scribbled purple-brown or black markings. The first eggs are likely to be laid during April, so the breeding season proper is still a little way off but it will run for several months, the birds attempting two or even three broods during this period.

At this time of the year I like to get my bearings on where territories are being established. Because I have a regular ‘beat’ I can soon work out where to focus my nest recording efforts later in the season. The work done now will make the task of finding and monitoring nests that much easier come the busy spring months.

What's in a name

I have been leafing through the new edition of my favoured bird guide, a publication that will accompany me on my birdwatching trips around the county. I hope that it will serve me as well as the battered copy of the first edition that it is now replacing. The book contains new information and so recognises new species, created where previously recognised races have been split into two. So now, for example, I have Yellow-legged and Caspian Gull. Annoyingly, for me at least, the guide contains some of the creeping changes in bird names that seems to come from an increasing Americanisation of our language. Gone are the Red-throated, Black-throated and Great Northern Divers, the ‘Diver’ now replaced by ‘Loon’. I cannot imagine any birdwatcher I know referring to the ‘Great Northern Loon’ at Whittlingham Country Park. At least the authors have not gone as far as those of a bird list that I saw recently; they’d replaced Common Gull with ‘Mew Gull’ and the term ‘Skua’ with ‘Jaeger’!

Somebody suggested that standardising the English names in this way is a sensible approach, enabling our New World cousins to understand which species we are writing or talking about. My natural response to this is that we already have names in place that enable those working on birds, in whichever country, to understand which species we mean. These are the Scientific names, based on the binomial system devised by Linnaeus.

Of course, such changes are not new and if you browse through bird guides from generations past, you will see many other examples of bird names that have changed. The Yellow Bunting of 1943 is now the Yellowhammer, the Hedge Sparrow is now Dunnock or Hedge Accentor and, going back further, the Red-breast is now the Robin. This last change of name is particularly interesting as the ‘Robin’ bit in ‘Robin Red-breast’ was a sort of country or folk name, in much the same way as some people refer to ‘Jenny Wren’. Imagine if we started calling the Wren, the ‘Jenny’!

I am often struck by how much more charm there is in the local names of birds than in many of the common names that we use at the national level. The ‘bee bird’ for Spotted Flycatcher is one of my favourite local Norfolk names but there are others: Bunt Lark (Corn Bunting), Blood Olp (Bullfinch – derived from ‘alpe’, the oldest known name for this bird and used by Chaucer) and the Sea Dotterel (Turnstone) are just three of many.

Whatever your views, names remain important because they enable us to communicate about these creatures and share our passions for the natural world.

Scheme charts nesting success

On a Saturday, by accident, I found my first yellowhammer nest of the year, situated just above the ground in a hawthorn bush and surrounded by rank grass. The presence of the nest was revealed when a female yellowhammer shot out of the bush I had just tapped with my butterfly net. Tapping bushes is a useful way of discovering hidden butterflies and other insects.

The nest was made of grass stems, woven together and lined with fine grass and hair. The front edge sported a ‘doorstep’, often characteristic of the species, and inside were three off-white eggs. Each egg was beautifully marked with a mixture of thin and thick squiggles, almost as if some child had taken a fine pen to a blank egg and added a random design. Having counted the number of eggs and checked that they were warm, I moved away to let the female back on. From a distance, I made a mental note of where the nest was located and jotted down a few notes in my field notebook. This would enable me to make further visits to the nest over the coming weeks and to collect information of value to the British Trust for Ornithology’s (BTO) Nest Record Scheme. Through the scheme, the BTO is able to gather essential information on breeding success and productivity for a large number of our breeding species. This information is then used alongside that from other BTO surveys to help find out why particular species are in decline or on the increase. The network of Nest Recorders operates under a strict code of conduct. This governs the way in which nests are visited and standardises the way in which information is collected. Recorders typically make a number of visits to each nest throughout the nesting period, in order to collect information on the number of eggs laid, the number which hatch and the number of chicks which survive through to fledging. Perhaps the most important information concerns the outcome of the nesting attempt: was it successful or did the nest fail because of predation, weather or desertion?

The timing of my visit, coupled with the presence of an incubating female, suggested that the clutch was complete at three eggs (yellowhammers may lay up to five eggs but don’t start incubating until the final egg has been laid). This will enable me to plan the timing of my next visit so that I can collect information on hatching success and gain a better indication of when the first egg had been laid. Two more visits will follow this and then I will send in my completed Nest Record Card to the BTO to add this important dataset.