Garden Greenfinches, shorty therapy, more woodland birding and a bit of antimatter

Over the years we have been blessed with many beautiful visitors to our bird feeders. Blue and Great Tits and Goldfinches are year round guests.  Coal Tits are also regular visitors all be in in much smaller numbers. The winter, however, seems to be the season when we can hope for something a little special. Last year, for example, was the year of the Brambling. For six wonderful weeks at the end of winter a flock of ten or so of these delightful northern visitors were almost every present under our feeders. Four years ago a spell of hard cold winter weather drove Siskins and Redpolls to our feeders in unprecedented numbers.

This year seems to be the year of the Greenfinch. While they are present every year this winter has been notable for their exceptional numbers. At any one time we have had up to twenty finches in and around the feeders. I find this very heartening as their numbers national have been greatly diminished by the  protozoal parasite Trichomonas gallinae.

There are three much sought after perches on their favoured sunflower seed feeder and, with so much competition this year, there is much squabbling to establish pecking rights. Their method of feeding is quite different from the tits who will daintily select a seed, fly up into the apple tree and peck it open while holding it with their feet. The large finch bill is a powerful dextrous tool for husking seeds of which they consume a large number at the feeders every visit. One or two males seem to be quite dominant, aggressively fighting off all-comers who they threaten with their powerful bill.

Photographing birds at feeders offers the photographer a greater element of control over his or her “studio” than would normally possible. For example, it is possible to be much more selective of the background by appropriate positioning of the feeder and camera. My own personal preference is for an out of focus background which, in my opinion, creates a pleasant and nondistracting canvas. In my garden I normally set up with the lawn in the background which I put completely out of focus by shooting with as small an aperture on my 800mm lens as possible.

The garden is slowly waking up from its winter slumber. Daffodils are in full bloom and the first shoots of many perennials are staring to push through the cold wet soil like old friends returning from their winter holidays. Most of last year’s cuttings are now potted on in the greenhouse and the propagator is in fulltime use. The wonder of planting seeds and watching these tiny dry and seemingly dead specs spring into life is to me akin to sitting on an aircraft while it accelerates down the runway and takes off – I can explain scientifically exactly why it happens but this in no way diminishes the magic and surprise when it actually does! I grow lobelias for our hanging baskets each year. Their seed is some of the finest, almost like dust, and is sown on top of the compost as light aids germination. After a few days the tiniest of little fragile seedlings emerge. I find it hard to imagine that soon they will be covered in glowing blue flowers and delighting us in our summer hanging baskets. Each year I like to try to grow at least one new thing in the vegetable garden and this year its global artichokes, a vegetable we both love but have never grown for some strange reason.

I’m really not an indoor person and the recent terrible weather has given me a serious dose of cabin fever. I used to suffer very badly from depression and being active outdoors was the best natural cure I found. So, with at least some let up in the rain on Tuesday, I decided that another dose of Short-eared Owl therapy was long over-due. The time that the owl activity starts is a bit hit and miss ranging from mid-afternoon right up to sunset. On a dry day following a number of wet ones the Owls seem to be driven by hunger to hunt early so I planned to be on site reasonable early. I hence arrived at just after 14:00 only to find three owls already out hunting. They seem to start off quartering the rough ground where they roost before slowly moving further afield hence the first hour of so after they take to wing is best for photography.

A lady photographer, who I have seen there a number of times, told me that up to six owls had been seen this winter. This made me really wonder how on earth the territory can feed so many mouths. There are at least two Kestrels and one Barn Owl also present so let’s round the number of hungry mouths up to ten for ease of calculation. A little research tells me that a healthy Owl needs three voles per night. Then assuming all ten predators are hunting for 4 months over winter suggest that a staggering three thousand six hundred and fifty voles are predated every winter! That’s a lot of voles in anyone’s money!

On Wednesday morning I headed off early to the forest of dean for another session of winter woodland birding. My first port of call was the church at Parkend where the mixed woodland is normally good for Crossbills. These lovely finches are again very dextrous seed eaters using their Crossbills to prize open fir cones for their prized seed. After a period of feeding they often come to puddles for a well-deserved drink of water. Last year they were reliable visitors to the puddles in the church car park and enterprising photographers took to keeping the puddles topped up with water, not such a problem this year I’m afraid! On arrival a birder was already in situi using his car as a hide. He had also seeded the area behind the pools. I didn’t fancy spending the morning in the car on this occasion, rather my plan was to go for a nice walk in the woods. I also suspected that the great abundance of ground water would make it less likely for the Crossbills to drink from the car park puddles. I did indeed encounter small numbers of Crossbills on my lovely peaceful woodland walk as well as reasonable numbers of Coal and Marsh Tits and Nuthatches. On my return to the car park I noticed a lovely male Crossbill by one of the car park puddles. Unfortunately I could see that the other birder clearly hadn’t noticed it as he was busy taking pictures of a Robin! I was too far away for photography nor did I have any way of alerting my fellow photographer without flushing the bird so I watched it with my bins for a few minutes before it flew off.  This encounter made me change my plans a little and I pulled my car up behind the other birder and watched and waited but there were no further crossbill visits and after an hour or so I’d had enough and made my way to my next port of call, New Yatt Rock.

My plan here was twofold. Firstly, to spend an hour or so at the raptor view point hoping to see Goshawks. Secondly, to take lunch at the small car park café which serves the most delicious home-made pasties I have ever tasted! On arrival at the view point I enquired about Goshawks but other birders present told me that there had been no sittings so far. Although the sun was doing its best to put in an appearance it was yet again very blustery which is not ideal for Goshawk sighting. The resident Peregrines, however, provided very satisfactory alternative entertainment, at one point continuously dive bombing a pair of Buzzards who had strayed to close to their cliff dwellings.

After my pasty, which was every bit as good as previous encounters, I finished my day at Cannop ponds. The alder trees around the ponds are normally reliable for winter Siskins but none were present today. I was chatting to a local birder about the lack of winter migrants this year and he commented that the normally fairly common winter trio of Crossbill, Siskin and Redpoll were very scare in the forest this year. This seems to tie in with a noticeable reduction in winter Thrushes around Standlake, notable Fieldfares. I’m guessing this is the result of this wet but mild winter meaning that the migrants not are pushed so far south.

Exotic Mandarin ducks are every present at Cannop ponds.  They are native to the far east but there are a number of well-established self-sustaining flocks in the UK. The attire of the male is very much in keeping with their exotic origin and always looks to me as though they are in fancy dress. The ladies, sadly, look as though they are the Cinderella of the party!

Right then, I'm off to the party!

I can't believe that he's left me behind again!

I thought I finish this latest instalment of waffle with a quick dive into yet another problem of modern physics. Our theories tell us that there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter created at the big bang. As antimatter immediately annihilates when it meets matter, the mass is converted into energy as per Einstein’s most famous equation, there should be no mass left in the universe, just the resultant energy

In our particular part of the universe this is clearly not true, we only exist because everything is made of matter and there is no antimatter. Our best theories also say that matter and antimatter should behave in exactly the same way apart from their opposite charges. There are two possible solutions to this dilemma. Firstly, our theories are wrong in that matter and antimatter differ in some unknown way. Secondly, that the antimatter is somewhere else in the universe that we can not observe. At CERN there is an antimatter factory which is testing the former possibility. Don’t worry it only produces a few thousand atoms of anti-hydrogen, not enough to even boil a cup to tea when it meets ordinary matter, so the earth is safe for the time being! Experiments have shown one small difference between the two (technical called charge parity violation) but it is much too small to explain the apparent absence of antimatter. One alternative is that gravity, that outlier of forces that we have discussed before, acts differently on antimatter. Bizarrely this means that antimatter would move up rather than down due to gravity and could explain how the matter and antimatter were separated in the early universe. So in Newton’s antimatter universe the apple would have not hit him on the head and he would hence not have constructed his theory of gravity! Experiments with anti-hydrogen are planned at CERN to see if antimatter does indeed move up rather than down!