It was very still out at Fife Ness this afternoon. And very dark. There wasn’t a lot going on, with the waders roosting even at low tide. Balcomie Beach was deserted apart from a couple of oystercatchers and redshanks. The greenshank – I think we can call it the resident greenshank now – was at Stinky Pool again. There were small flocks of purple sandpiper on the rocks. The sea was flat calm and there was almost nothing passing, a very distant immature gannet and a black-throated diver. It felt very much like the end of the year.
Oystercatcher on its own on Balcomie Beach today
The weather forecast is for rain most of tomorrow morning so I think I will delay my New Year’s day bird race to the 2nd. This year the Crail patch list is up to 175, narrowly missing the record of last year of 176. I still need tawny owl so I could go out looking for one tonight but I think I will leave it now and be content with the second best year list so far. The 2022 Crail patch list is here.
I was out with my nephew Oscar this afternoon – he is on the cusp of getting into birding (although he wouldn’t have been out with me if the world cup was still on). We went on a duck safari – they are good beginner’s birds. Easy to see, easy to identify and nice looking. We started at Carnbee Reservoir. There were the usual flocks of wigeon, teal, tufted duck and goldeneye, but unexpectedly, a female velvet scoter. They are marine ducks in winter and this was the first I have seen on freshwater. It was keeping close company with two tufted ducks.
Female velvet scoter at Carnbee Reservoir
We then went to Cameron Reservoir. Sadly still outside the Crail patch at 14 km from my house so the two male smews there didn’t count for the year list. We added them to our duck safari list and Oscar was impressed – as anyone is – by these immaculate black and white sawbills, that only ever turn up when it is particularly cold in eastern Europe. There were a few goosanders new as well. We finished off down at St Andrews, scoping from West Sands for sea duck. We were less successful there – it was getting dark even by 3 pm and the common scoters were just black blobs far out in a choppy sea. Finding the scaup and the appropriately behaving velvet scoter with them required some imagination.
I was back along the shore at Balcomie at high tide again today. This time cutting across the golf course at Balcomie cottages and taking in more of the rocky shore. The monthly tides are high at the moment and so the washed up banks of rotting wrack are being inundated, flushing out the seaweed fly maggots and the sandhoppers. All making one of the best local wildlife spectacles to be seen, with hundreds of birds of many species congregating within a few meters of the coastal path. Today I looked at the ducks – eiders, teal, wigeon and mallards – mixed in with the gulls, and the redshanks swimming like ducks to get at the seaweed edges as they were washed by the waves. From the other side, on the beach, it was rock pipits and the occasional stonechat and pied wagtail, with a flock of over 100 linnet and a few twite dancing overhead.
A redshank half wading, half swimming to get at the floating maggots and sandhoppers (black-headed gull behind doing the same)Black-headed gulls and a common gull – part of a much larger flock – congregating on the high tide at Balcomie today
I was on Balcomie Beach at high tide this morning. The north end as it becomes rocky and then the first headland about 100 meters further on is always good at high tide, whether gulls, eiders or as today, waders. There was a roost and feeding parties of dunlins and redshanks, with a few turnstone, purple sandpipers and sanderling among them, and a single bar-tailed godwit and grey plover. Probably over 75 birds in all. I joined John Anderson sitting on the beach quietly and soon they were within a few meters. They flushed as a dog walker came by and their collie trotted along the beach, but paradoxically this helps when you are staking out birds. They leave but then so does the disturbance, you stay put as part of the landscape and the birds return more relaxed with your presence. But the species vary in their lack of shyness – purple sandpipers are the least worried, then dunlin, then sanderling. Turnstones are on the other end of the spectrum, although bar-tailed godwits and grey plovers are the shyest. Disturbance distance roughly correlates with body size – bigger birds tend to tolerate people less because they need more time to escape and are more likely to be on the menu for a larger predator.
Dunlin returning (John Anderson)Confiding dunlin on Balcomie Beach this morning
I walked the loop from Kilminning along the coast to Fife Ness and back via Craighead this morning. The weather was a bit milder this morning with most of the ground outside the frost pockets unfrozen, but even so 5 woodcock greeted me at lower Kilminning, flying up from the trees at the entrance. The sea was fairly wintery looking, with a great northern diver lumbering past. A few kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots and red-throated divers were at Fife Ness but nothing unusual apart from three gannets to remind me that the spring is only a few months away. There was a nice mixed flock of thrushes on the golf course, enjoying the fact that it was closed and they had it to themselves. About 100 fieldfares and redwings with a single mistle thrush.
The cold weather continues and there were more fieldfares in the gardens in the centre of Crail today as inland birds head out towards the milder coast. This was very obvious down at Roome Bay as I flushed 4 common snipe from the grass by the old toilet block. They flew up but not away, circling around to land as soon as they could back on the relatively unfrozen ground. There will be more snipe and some woodcock in Crail tomorrow: try walking down your garden at dawn and some will pop up from the flowerbeds or veg patch.
Common snipe flying away (John Anderson). Easy to identify by their ridiculously long, straight bills, stripes and thrush size. If you have this but with autumn leaf colours and the size of a woodpigeon, then it is a woodcock.
It is cold. Well, cold for Crail. Below freezing all day. I walked along the frozen field edges behind Balcomie Caravan Park this morning. They were amazingly full of birds. The wild bird seed mix edges, the mini-field of unharvested wheat along the new fence line and a field of freshly sown rape are all paying dividends. It was hard to count all the birds there, several hundred perhaps: corn buntings, tree sparrows, skylarks, reed buntings, yellowhammers, goldfinches and greenfinches. And 25 grey partridges in two warring coveys. Some of the corn buntings were even singing from the middle of the rape field, celebrating the abundance of food. Cold weather is not a problem to birds if there is enough to eat.
I have spent the weekend in the town I was born in and where I started bird watching 43 years ago. It has been very cold, and with freezing fog, so not a birding weekend. But I have noticed a few things that have changed since I was a boy – and all positive to remind me that things can get better rather than always worse. The first thing was a grey wagtail on the frozen rooftops of the high street, and then a couple more flying over later to show it wasn’t a one off. I never saw a grey wagtail in Royston in the 1980s and they were a rarity in most other places in East Anglia. Since I moved to Crail, I have been noticing how grey wagtails have become more common on roof tops in winter, but I have never been sure that this was just a Crail thing, or if grey wagtails were changing habitats. Moving from a specialist of uncommon rocky streams to a generalist of the wet slates and tiles that can be found in in every town and city of the UK. Seeing them on Royston rooftops now suggests this urban transition might really be happening. Blackbirds and robins became urban specialists a couple of hundred years ago; peregrines have adopted cities in the last seventy. Another species adapting to urban environments is good news. They are not going away.
Grey wagtail (John Anderson) – a wet slate roof is just a small jump away from some wet rocks in a stream
The other positive things I noticed were the birds of prey. Two sparrowhawks in thirty minutes over the rooftops: I saw a couple in ten years in the 1980s. A handful of buzzards during the day where I saw only a couple in the 1980s. And most spectacularly of all, 14 red kites yesterday when they were just a an extreme Welsh rarity when I started bird watching, and I would never have dreamed of seeing them over my home town. We have regulated some poisons, stopped persecution of raptors and have reintroduced species over the last 40 years. Some things have got better. And other things can get better too if we just put our minds to it, or like the grey wagtails, we have a bit of luck and a species adapts to what we provide.
It’s been three weeks. Since then I have been to Zimbabwe. My first trip to Africa for nearly three years. Covid and all that. It was good to go back and to experience our shared birds where they really belong. Last week I was with flocks of common swifts, house martins and barn swallows hawking over the woodland of Hwange National Park; European cuckoos and red-backed shrikes in almost every bush in the green rainy season savannah; ospreys, wood sandpipers and greenshanks along the Zambezi River; and more exotic, dreamt off, Crail migrants like European and blue-cheeked bee-eaters, collared pratincoles and flocks of spectacular Amur falcons. All of these birds breed in northern Europe or Asia and migrate to spend most of their non-breeding season in Africa. Amur falcons in particular migrate over 10,000 kilometers from central China to south-east Africa, including, for many individuals, a 5,000 mile non-stop crossing of the Indian Ocean from India to Mozambique. Knowing this, I have long wanted to see Amur falcons and I wasn’t disappointed. They are spectacular to look at (reds and blue-greys and black and white) and occur in giant flocks of over 100 birds, hawking termites and dragonflies over the savannah. It is one thing to see a flock of swallows, another to see a flock of falcons.
Two female Amur Falcons in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe last week – the rains had just started in earnest and so there were a lot of winged termites for them to catch
But back to Crail this week and a stark contrast – a drop of 30 degrees and no swallows for another four months. I went down to Balcomie this morning and watched the semi-frozen shorebirds scurrying along the beach. When it’s a few degrees like today then every bit of energy counts: choosing a sheltered bit of shore out of the wind, minimizing disturbances and picking up every possible bit of food to convert to heat. There were flocks of dunlin and ringed plover about, but no sanderling. The redshanks were among the rocks where it is more sheltered or on the golf course. A greenshank was a reminder of the warmth last week, but this one looked like it might be regretting its trade-off between minimizing migration energy expenditure and maximizing winter energy expenditure. The sea was choppy but fairly quiet and no gannets to be seen as they spend mid-winter off Spain, Portugal and West Africa. On the way back to Crail with very cold fingers I encountered two flocks of grey partridges. One of 8 and the other of 13, barely three hundred meters apart. I am fairly sure that both of these coveys are the products last summer’s breeding attempts on either side of the road as you leave Crail for Fife Ness. They have been in the same fields ever since. Once again we have grey partridges all over the East Neuk, doing well like the corn buntings. And speaking of corn buntings – they were singing yesterday in three territories along the shore at West Braes. Despite the cold weather, indicating that they are not that bothered by it yet. The cold weather is forecast to continue for a couple of weeks so we might expect some problems for the local birds and some of the inland thrushes, waders and geese to come out to join us on the milder coast.
Wild Crail 