I was out west on Skye last week when I was reminded of what we are missing. I try not to write doom and gloom. We need to celebrate what we have and work towards making things better, not wring our hands. But every so often it is brought home to me that there is a biodiversity crisis and I have just gradually got used to the general loss of animals in the environment around me. I was walking along a farm track up by the coral beach on Skye when I heard a sound that used to be part of every summer for me. Not a corncrake – I’m not that old – but a spotted flycatcher family, the newly fledged chicks calling to their parents, and the parents catching flies at an incredible rate to feed them. Spotted flycatchers used to breed everywhere in the UK and any parkland corner, ivy covered mature garden or bit of open woodland might have a pair of spotted flycatchers sitting grumpily on an exposed perch before dashing off after a fly. They used to breed in this part of Fife – there were occasional pairs around St Andrews twenty years ago when I first moved here and they have bred in the last ten years at Kenly and Cambo. But its not the flycatcher festival that was my childhood. We have lost over 80% of the spotted flycatchers that bred in the UK over the last 40 years. And their range has contracted to the west. We only see spotted flycatchers around Crail on passage spring and autumn. The flycatcher family on Skye were the first I have seen in a while and I had a magical twenty minutes watching them closely in a wooded croft garden the way I used to watch them in my granny’s garden in the 1980s. The reason for their decline is not clear at all, but many other migrants have also had big declines: it is probably too many links in their global chain – if anything a spotted flycatcher needs disappears between Liberia and Scotland, then the chain breaks. They have so many things that can go wrong that sooner or later somebody, somewhere makes it so. We need joined up thinking and people working all along their flyway to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
I am in the last week of corn bunting mapping – the final total is 398. I haven’t had a new territory for eight days now. The total number is still changing as I discover errors in numbering, or work out one big territory is in fact two, or that a territory was misclassified and never had a proper singing bird in it. Any bird starting a new territory probably doesn’t have enough time to complete a breeding attempt so this sudden disappearance of any new territories is perhaps not surprising. I can still discover a new territory that I have missed earlier of course, but as the season goes on there are few places I haven’t been, several times. And there are the territories that are out of the area I cover – usually a handful between Strathkinness and Guardbridge, that get reported to me later. So far I have only been told about one such territory this year. I may yet hit the magic 400. In the 1990s this was always less than 100, perhaps as low as 60 at one point, so 400 is a good number!
This summer has been about the distribution of territories and how this changes from month to month. So I have had to neglect the more in depth stuff. Like individual breeding success. I am encountering lots of birds that are feeding chicks and some that have clearly fledged a brood a while ago and have moved them to the best feeding areas. Every time I see a corn bunting with a beak full of food, that is not too far away from me, I try to take a picture. It is possible to see what the chicks are being fed by magnifying these photos – caterpillars, beetles, spiders. I hope to relate this to when and where a pair is breeding to get a better idea of variation in territory quality. But first I need a lot of nests and photos. One surprise (to me) so far is that corn buntings sometimes feed their chicks – the older, probably fledged chicks particularly – a type of porridge. They seem to grind up the nearly ripe winter wheat seeds into a fibrous paste for the chicks. This may be a particularly Scottish thing and may reflect a shortage of insect food in the territory. Porridge may be the corn bunting chick starvation food.
A corn bunting feeding crushed up cereal to its chicks at Kippo Farm this morning
I have bumped into few other birds of note this week. The yellow wagtails that are nesting at Balcomie (June 23rd) are still going strong. The female mobbed me continuously when I was in the area a few days ago. I should think there were newly fledged chicks in the potato field. On the 9th I had seven ravens over Kingsbarns Distillery. It may have been 2 adults and 5 young – this is possible: only two of them really looked like adults. Perhaps there are three raven families in the East Neuk this summer. Today I had two or three common crossbills flying high overhead at Dunino – calling away as they always do in flight. These are my first crossbills in the local Crail patch this year.
More signs of late summer and the coming autumn. I had my first whinchat of the season on a wire fence (their natural habitat from Norway to Nigeria) at Bowhouse. A handsome male, still bright from breeding. It was probably in the hills in Perthshire yesterday. And the waders are coming back to the shore. As I walked along the coastal path at St Monans (a couple of corn bunting territories to refind there) I could hear redshanks and common sandpipers calling. I miss redshanks in the shore soundscape for the couple of months they are way, but never realise how much until they come back again. Common sandpipers are only with us until August and become less and less vocal. In early July they call like they are on an upland lochan. It’s another lovely call, evocative of lots of great Scottish and African places, as well as late summer here. I saw another late summer visitor at Elie a couple of days ago – a Mediterranean gull. They are here year round in small numbers but during July their numbers build up further in the Firth of Forth and the overspill comes to the East Neuk. Checking any large group of gulls – following a plough, or roosting on the shore – will likely turn up a Med gull in the next month.
Redshank (John Anderson). One of the voices of the shore, back with us for the next 10 months.
I hit the magic number of 400 corn bunting territories this morning – briefly – before dropping back down to 399 again later on when I had a reality check at a couple of May territories that were most likely to be just the one. I finished resurveying all of my May territories this week and since then the number of new territories has gone down. I have found that during June I don’t lose any territories – if a bird is established in May then they will be there in June. And instead I gain territories – about 20% in any area. I think this is probably the young birds getting established for their first breeding season and they select their breeding areas mostly by filling in the gaps of the established territories of the older birds. But by July I do lose territories as breeders fail and try their luck elsewhere. Sometimes this is spectacular.
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Today I revisited the fantastic fallow field just to the north of Kingsbarns where I had 7 territories in June, and probably even more nesting attempts. From boom to bust – I found the field was being harrowed after being ploughed the day before. All of the nesting habitat and all of the active nests will have been destroyed, although I would expect a few of them fledged chicks during June so it won’t have been a complete disaster. But putting this aside, this is an opportunity to see what corn buntings do when their territory is effectively destroyed. The short and perhaps not unexpected answer is, they move if they have to. As I approached the field from the old railway line, I picked up two new territories in quick succession, with very active singers and territorial chases in a previously empty field. I thought this was too good to be true and I crested the hill and saw the fallow field gone below me. I walked around the bare earth field and found two of the seven territories still in the same place. These were birds that had been singing on the edge of the field and with well developed potato fields on the other side of them. One corn bunting was already singing every so often from the middle of the potato field. Another two edge birds had moved a hundred meters or so into adjacent fields, and then another three were new territories I found within 900 meters of the field. At the end of my extensive stump around the area I was only down one territory from the original seven using the previously fallow field. This is well within the bounds of detectability meaning that you can’t find everything, and I may just have missed the seventh this visit.
Fallow field at Kingsbarns early June with seven territories in itAnd the field today… still two territories holding on along the bushes at the far end with a potato field beyond
New territories starting now can easily still have a successful breeding attempt. It takes a corn bunting a minimum of about 29 days to go from no nest to fledged chicks. There are many nests on the go until early August every year, and chicks fledged in August seem to do well, particularly because the winter wheat is now ripe so the porridge their parents start feeding them after they fledge is limitless and very close to hand (bill). Nevertheless, these mid-season field changes – whether cuts for silage or hay, or ploughing for late crops – are not great news. At best they reduce the number of successful breeding attempts of birds using the field by half. I think one of the reasons our local corn bunting population is doing so well is that these mid-season catastrophes affect only a small proportion of fields.
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July is a relatively quiet time for other birds that breed a bit earlier. They have fledged their chicks and start moulting. Common whitethroats have stopped singing and are feeding fledged chicks, although there are still sedge warblers singing. Quails are late season breeders too – they breed from late winter to early autumn as they move northward in Europe. I had at least two quail calling from the fields at Kippo Farm by the old railway. The habitat is just perfect – a meadow steppe of fields planted late with a flower rich grass mix, with the plants about 15 centimeters high now. I had my first whimbrel flying over Crail yesterday with a couple of curlews, and the first passage juvenile northern wheatear today to show that autumn is coming.
The male “channel” yellow wagtail is having another go at breeding at Oldbarns. I have seen it every time I go along the main road this week. It was feeding alongside the puddles from the heavy rain shower this afternoon before flying back into the winter wheat to maintain its vigil on – I think – its second nesting attempt. So far we are up to 4 nesting attempts from 2 pairs of yellow wagtails this year. None successful so far. Chick feeding is usually obvious and I haven’t seen any. Later nests seem to be more successful so there is still time to keep our precarious population going.
Wild Crail 