Spring is on the way. The temperature jumped up a few degrees today, there was a southerly wind and a fair bit of rain. The result, the third summer migrant species of the season appearing. This one a bit more unexpected than the lesser black-backed gulls and chiffchaffs: a ring ouzel that was found by local legend Chris Smout at Lower Kilminning this morning. I went down to see it early evening in the heavy rain. You never ignore a ring ouzel. They are great birds and there are only a few a year – almost all turning up at Kilminning in the autumn. I found a very well marked bird – like a male in its nearly white big breast band, and lots of white in the wing, but with a brownish tinge to its paler fringed body features which suggested a female to me. But it was low in the grass or the bushes in the far south-west corner, or feeding along the scenic airfield fence among the discarded tyres, and it was raining hard, so it wasn’t ideal conditions for a close appraisal. Nice to see though and to hear its stone on stone chacking that gives them away when they are doing their usual shy skulking. Today’s bird will be on its way to the Highlands or Scandinavia from wintering in the hill forests of Iberia or North Africa.
I have been out all day at Kilminning. This time last year we planted over 2,000 trees – maybe as many as 2,500 if you count all the willow wands and hedging plants. Today we were checking to see how they were: weeding and mulching and straightening and replacing stakes. Last autumn I checked the trees by looking down the tree guard tubes and any trees I couldn’t see or without leaves I considered dead. I estimated we had 80% survival rate and I was elated. I had been hoping for more than 50% but thought it would probably be lower. I got a pleasant surprise today. All the tree guards that were full of grass or other vegetation where I thought the tree had been swamped turned out to have a live sapling in them. It was really hard today to find any dead trees at all. I estimate now that we easily have over 95% survival of everything we planted last year. This is more than brilliant considering the trials of drought and plenty of deer being around last summer. It was immensely satisfying to weed and remulch each tree guard and find a little tree of hope in almost every one. We planted another 25, 2 year old oak trees as well.
And more good news. A team of archaeologists have been at Kilminning this week using ground penetrating radar to find out if the medieval graveyard there is anywhere near where we might hope to dig the big pond. They haven’t analysed the data fully but their impression was there was nothing there but soil. They picked up the foundations of the old farm house at the edge of area which provided the proof of the process, but nothing indicative of cists and other graveyard remains. This is really encouraging, leaving 0.6 Ha of ground at Kilminning without significant archaeology, historic tarmac or SSSI status where we might just be allowed to fit the planned pond in.
Mulching last year’s saplings at Kilminning – every tree guard a winner!
The Crail harbour master stopped me as I said hello outside the co-op. He told me that there was a colour-ringed wader lying dead at the harbour and had been for some time. I said it was most likely one of my colour-ringed redshanks although I haven’t ringed any redshanks in Crail for 9 years. I thought them all dead by now – it has been a couple of years since I saw any of my colour-ringed birds. Redshanks have a longevity record of 27 years, but most of my Crail birds only lasted 5 or 6 years. The harbour master delivered the corpse to my porch a bit later after I enthused about seeing it to find out for sure. It was one of my birds – GGLG (green over green left leg above the knee, lime over green right leg above the knee, and my scheme identifiers, a tall blue ring on each leg below the knee). It was intact but fairly smelly and its innards had been eaten out by maggots. So dead for a month at least, and probably dead from starvation or disease in the cold weather of a month ago. I caught GGLG in the harbour on the 29th January 2010, at 20:33 in a net across the entrance. It was a juvenile, so born in 2009. And it was a very small bird so almost certainly a British, probably Scottish breeder (the northern Isles or the Hebrides perhaps). Assuming it died in February then it was 13 years and 8 months old. Not bad really. In the meantime it has been around the harbour, harbour beach and Roome Bay every winter except the last couple. I wonder where it has been, although if it moved round the coast a little towards Anstruther, then I would easily overlook it. A couple of my other redshanks did this some winters but I am embarrassed not to have noticed it, assuming them all dead. I will run the numbers sometime to work out their annual survival rate properly. This is likely the last one gone now.
I met a silverfish in my kitchen when I got up this morning. I haven’t seen a silverfish for a long time – they were a feature of my childhood. Always one caught in the sink or bathtub. But houses are dryer and cleaner now, with fewer margins for things like silverfish and spiders. Silverfish are cool insects and I miss them. Like little silver space vehicles, zipping across the floor at super speed.
Silverfish
I went down to Balcomie a bit later. It was approaching high tide and the waders were roosting – a single bar-tailed godwit among the curlew and oystercatchers on the rocks behind Stinky Pool. At Fife Ness there was a steady passage of guillemots and razorbills north, and a single black guillemot, in full black and white summer plumage. There were small flocks of puffins heading in the other direction – heading south to the Farnes or the May Island. Pre-breeding flocks will be building up around the breeding colonies over the next month.
There was a goldcrest at Upper Kilminning doing a good impression of a firecrest call and as I tried to track it down I found two chiffchaffs. The first of the spring. They were feeding vigorously high up in the canopy and without singing or calling, so I should think they were just in on the southerlies. March the 18th is one of my earliest dates for a spring arriving chiffchaff on the Crail patch. They usually arrive at the beginning of April (although they turn up elsewhere in Fife earlier). It is hard to tell some years because of wintering chiffchaffs, but there haven’t been any locally this winter. We might be in for an early season – there was a swallow reported from Fife today!
I was looking at the cormorants down at Kilminning Coast, appreciating the emerald green eyes of the full adult breeders, when I saw some dark shapes breaking the surface behind them. A pod of 25 or so bottle-nosed dolphins was coming past from Crail. The sea was fairly flat today – no coincidence – the dolphins are out there most of the time. They just aren’t very visible when the waves are any height, and that is most days.
Cormorants at Kilminning – full adult breeding on the left and a first year bird on the rightTwo of the bottle-nosed dolphins passing Kilminning this morning
I was on the beach at Roome Bay just after sunrise this morning looking for rock pipits. It was just after high tide and the beach had been washed clean. In the east corner, just as the cliffs start I noticed some tracks that came out of the water and then followed the tide edge for a few meters before disappearing among the rocks. There were no other tracks around it on the beach so it was something that could only just have come out of the water – an otter. I looked closely at the footprints – five toes (even the fainter 5th one visible in the soft sand), a long pad, no signs of claws, and the faint trace of a web between the toes. 100% otter. And only a minute or two in front of me. I expect it left the beach just as I arrived and if I had just been looking there instead of being distracted by the goldeneyes fishing right at the edge of the beach a little closer. But once again a great sign that otters are becoming more common around Crail.
The otter track – 5 toes, but number 5 hard to see. You can see the track better if you squint at the photo.
The frogs did their business on the warm day on Sunday. Today there were about ten big clumps of spawn. Some of the frogs were bravely trying to keep it going in the very cold water but it looked like tough going. They didn’t even make the effort to dive under the water on my approach.
There is a fair bit of ploughing going on at the moment as fields are sown with spring barley. It always makes a spectacle with many birds following the tractor as the soil gets turned over and literally thousands of earth worms get exposed. The followers are usually gulls: herring, black-headed and common, with the occasional Mediterranean gull, as well as lesser black-backed gulls later in the month. And there is usually a buzzard or two. But this morning I watched a grey heron in a field behind Anstruther stalking some newly exposed earth for earth worms. It looked very African – like a bustard or a crane, walking across the savanna looking for locusts. Grey herons are great generalists and I have seen them hunting in terrestrial habitats many times, but earthworms as prey was a new one for me. They will eat gamebird and gull chicks, mice and voles, and they will also eat big insects in warmer climates.
The grey heron feeding on earthworms in a newly ploughed field this morning
It was much milder today, with afternoon temperatures at about 11 degrees. The frogs in my garden have been fairly patient over the last very cold week, although a few hardy individuals were swimming (slowly) in the pond even as the ice melted. All change today. Frogageddon, with 40 or more frogs poking their heads out of the water, waiting for their chance. Some females were around. Or at least I think so, they were invisible underneath a scrum of males.
Three male frogs (I think) with a female somewhere in the centre. Frogspawn soon, although it doesn’t rise to the surface until a couple of days afterwards
I sat on Kincraig Hill overlooking the woods at Shell Bay this morning – you can see all the way from Kirkaldy to Colinsburgh. It was cold but sunny, with little wind. The common buzzards thought it was a perfect day and I could see a dozen pairs spread out over the landscape in front of me, soaring and displaying to each other. Buzzards do a sky dance like a lot of raptors when they start breeding – to stake out a territory and to attract or keep a mate. They soar up to a few hundred meters then half closing their wings, dive down then back up, and down again, and so in making a serrated path through the sky. There is usually a second bird below it that prompts the show. Then the pair will soar up together in a leisurely contrast. Closer to Crail, the best place to see displaying buzzards is at Kilminning or Kirkmay. During their displays a pair might cover the ground so I have seen them sky dancing high over the High Street – the gulls don’t like it at all and make a noisy fuss, providing a ready cue to have a look out for the buzzards.
It is always a shame to find a bit of road kill. There have been a few badger victims over the last couple of weeks as they start to become more mobile with the spring. Yesterday I spotted a dead owl beside the road at Fairmont. I pulled over and walked back to find a tawny owl. It must have been hit the night before, perhaps as it swooped down onto a mouse crossing the road. If it was a mouse then it got away with it, but not the owl. Tawny owls are fairly common almost everywhere in Scotland but they are not that common around Crail because they need a little bit of woodland. It varies between years but there is usually a pair in the Kirkyard and Denburn and occasionally I hear them hooting from my garden if it is a still night with the breeze coming from the direction of Sypsies. Tawny owls are strictly nocturnal so I hardly ever see them unless they are being mobbed by the local blackbirds so I can find them in their daytime hiding places. Or you can try hooting to attract them at night – this does work – tawny owls are very, very territorial and can’t stand the presence of another owl in their territory. It will be chased off or killed. Some good hoots and a torch can lead to good view of a tawny owl before it realises it has been fooled.
The roadkill tawny owl on the right – owls are all head – a giant mouth and huge eyes, and then all claws. Tawnys owls have short wings which are perfect for flying around woodland in the dark.
There were more corn buntings tuning up at Boarhills this morning including a clear pair, with a male singing from a dyke and a female ticking as if she had a nest from another nearby. It is far too early for a nest by at least two and a half months but this is what pairs do before they start building in May, and it is a great sign of a committed territory. Boarhills doesn’t have any obvious non-breeding flocks of corn buntings (although they are only a kilometer away at Boghall at the moment) so a corn bunting singing in a field there has more significance as well – not just song from a crowd of excited wintering birds as the flock outside of Crail at the moment. Corn bunting territoriality makes no real sense to me yet. They do better in a crowd, they can breed very successfully at very high density and there is more habitat than they use in the East Neuk. Perhaps it is not defending a territory at all. Perhaps it is all male signaling – without the long haul display to indicate their fitness the females just go elsewhere.
I walked down to the pond and then Kenly Water, sitting on the opposite side to usual, looking towards Hillhead. The usual teal, wigeon and mallards, three greenshank, and a flock of lapwings and golden plover. I walked back north along the coast. There is still a flock of geese present, but this morning of just nine greylag geese, lounging in a winter wheat field.
Another species getting its black hood for the summer – a male reed bunting at Boarhills this morning
I cycled my favourite route this morning – now spring is coming the motivation to cover the ground is increasing. I started at Balcomie Caravan Park where the buntings are still in force. Now the corn buntings are really singing, with territorial looking birds perched around the edge of the adjacent fields, and a melee of singing from individuals feeding on the ground in the middle of the fields. How these turn into territories in a couple of months will be interesting. Two single birds were singing further along at Wormiston Farm and down at the cow field (although with sheep in it currently) at the end of Balcomie Golf Course. Both are always early singing territories, although the former was abandoned last year by mid-May because the crop was rape which they don’t like to breed in, whereas the latter turned into one of my earliest nests (and also the year before).
There were a lot of teal along the shore on the way to Balcomie Beach, but almost no small shorebirds. And very few rock pipits. I have been trying to catch rock pipits this week to put some geolocator tags on them and I am beginning to feel I might have missed the boat. At Fife Ness it was a steady passage of small flocks of razorbills heading north. There has been a big passage of razorbills this week as there usually is in early March. Thousands every hour heading up to the northern isles and Iceland to start breeding next month.
Then back through Kilminning and Sauchope. I was looking for black redstarts that pass through in March – never reliable and a long shot, but it is one of the best times to just bump into one on the coastal path. I had to make do with checking the gulls. The black-headed gulls are getting their chocolate hoods back for the spring and some will be heading back inland to breed in only a few weeks. And finally through the kirkyard when I got back to Crail. I could just see the top of a heron sitting flat on the nest behind the kirk as if it is now on eggs. I hope so.
A black-headed gull at the outflow at Kilminning gaining its hood ready for breeding in April
It has been a quiet week. I had my first lesser black-backed gull of the year perched on the harbour wall at Cellardyke a couple of days ago. I usually get my first one there in early March and it is probably the same bird returning early to claim its territory amongst the cellardyke chimney pots. It may have lived in Cellardyke as long as I have lived in Crail. I hope it is a North African wintering bird with sight of Casablanca a week or so ago.
Lesser black-backed gull (John Anderson)
The dunlins and sanderlings are coming and going at Balcomie. They must move up and down the coast over a larger area than I usually bird watch so it seems like their numbers fluctuate. A single bar-tailed godwit was at Balcomie most of the week. There was a young seal pup hauled up on the beach between Stinky Pool and Balcomie Bay for a couple of days. It looked happy and healthy and was probably just taking a breather from the cold water.
This week’s grey seal pup at Balcomie (John Anderson)
March arrived this morning and despite the continuing cold north-easterly there was a lot of song. The great tits and robins of early February have been joined by the blackbirds and song thrushes. There was even a grey wagtail having a bit of a sing behind the bus stop at Bowling Green Place. It is always optimistic when the light extends beyond six in the evening again and the birds are waking you up too early again.
Wild Crail 