A Tale of two Pipits, Olive and Tawny , for the love of Choughs and incomprehensible quantum mechanics.
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| Tawny Pipit |
Now there’s a list of things in a title I can guaranteed you won’t find very often!
Two weeks ago on Wednesday I ventured out on a somewhat mad day trip to Cornwall in an attempt to see, and hence UK tick, an Eastern Sub-Alpine Warbler. Why mad? Well two reasons really. Firstly, it had been on a site close to Lands End for several days, started off showing quite well but had become more elusive, a habit I have previously noted in birds that were about to disappear! Secondly, we were going to St Just near Lands End for a holiday 48 hours later. My rational for going, or perhaps I should say my irrational distorted sense of reality, was that the bird would definitely not stay another 48 hours and even if it did spending a whole holiday day staring at a bush rather than with my wife and two dogs would have been a very selfish act landing me in very hot water!
I was up at silly o’clock and on site near Lands End some 4 hours later. On arrival I spied several birders wandering around peering in different directions with bins which did not bode very well at all. To cut a long story short, the bird had not been seen since midday the previous day and had clearly done a bunk! So after a couple of fruitless hours I decided to cut my losses and make my way to the nearby Kenidjack Valley to see if I could find some Choughs which are high up on my list of favourite UK resident birds. Kenidjack valley is beautiful in its own right with a small burbling stream that makes its way down to a stony protected cove via some old tin mine workings and rusting water pumps. The valley was full of spring lushness with vibrant bluebells and other spring flowers in full bloom. I find these old ruined tin mines with their crumbling ventilation towers set as they are into the rugged Cornish coastline to be both atmospheric and appealing. Their ruined beauty does, however, have a dark side with many lives lost in the hot and humid claustrophobic small shafts. Miners toiled in quite appalling conditions to make landowners fortunes.
I soon spied a small flock of Choughs engaged in wonderful aerial displays of diving and swooping. They eventually settled on a rather distant small patch of grass and started to feed on insects. All too distant for photography but giving great views through my scope. With its black plumage the Chough is readily identifed as a crow, but it has a red bill and legs unlike any other member of the crow family. It is restricted to the west of the British Isles where there are some 350 pairs.
The Chough features on the Cornish coat of arms where it proudly sits on top of the crest flanked by a tin miner and fisherman. The Chough's Cornish name, Palores, means digger, a reference to its habit of digging away at loose soil to find invertebrates.
The usual sad story of wanton persecution and habitat loss resulted in the Chough becoming extinct as a breeding species in Cornwall by 1950. Happily, this was not the end of the Chough’s Cornish story. In 2001, there was a small influx of Choughs to southern England and three birds stayed on the Lizard in Cornwall. A now famous pioneering pair nested every year from 2002 raising a total of 32 young. Nature will heal if we would only let it! Here are a few photos of Choughs taken in the UK a couple of years back.
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| Though |
While I was at Kenidjack a report came through of an Olive-backed Pipit in the valley, a bird I’ve seen previously in Norfolk some years ago with Jeremy. The location directions were somewhat vague but I soon found a friendly birder who pointed me in the right direction.
Now this is a well and truly lost bird as its normal summer range runs from European Russia through to the Himalayas and into China. It winters in south eastern Asia. Somewhat surprisingly then, it is a fairly regular vagrant to the UK with ten or so annual records. The majority of the Pipit family spend a lot of time on the ground. For the observer this can be a good or bad thing depending on the particular species favoured habitat. Olive-backed Pipits tend to favour woodland and its edges usually making them quite challenging to see. The two that Jeremy and I saw in Wells wood in Norfolk a few years ago were only showing occasionally when they moved to clearer ground in the woodland and even then were quite challenging to pick up. The Cornwall bird had originally been sitting up on a wire fence but had disappeared into deep grass by the time I arrived. It was eventually flushed, not by me I hasten to add (!) and gave me my first good flight view of the species. Here is a rather distant record shot of one of the Wells woods birds.
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| Olive-backed Pipit |
Our weeks holiday in Cornwall was extremely enjoyable and relaxing with lots of long walks. My rule of these family holidays is only to bird on my own when something rare has been found locally and no such bird was found during our holiday. Perhaps the bird highlight of the week was watching Gannets fishing, a sight that I will never get bored of. While down in Cornwall I went online to order a repeat prescription from my doctor and was somewhat surprised to discover that an appointment had been made for my second Covid jab on the Wednesday! I called the surgery to check and they told me that I should have had a letter confirming the appointment. I investigated rearranging it but this seemed quite problematic as my surgery had done comparatively few Pfizer jabs and I needed to have the same one as my first jab. In the end I bit the bullet and did the 500 mile round trip again on Wednesday. This did allow me a fleeting 10 minute visit to my local Clifford pits to see a rather showy American Lesser Yellowlegs. So three 500 mile round trips to Cornwall in 10 days. They will be naming a stretch of the M5 after me soon!
While on holiday I read The Lamplighters, the debut novel by Emma Stone. It a fictional story about the unexplained disappearance of 3 lighthouse keepers in a lighthouse off the Cornish coast in the 1940’s – very well written with great character building and highly recommended if you like thrillers with a little bit of ghost story mixed in!
Towards the end of the holiday reports stared to come in of two birds quite close to each other in Dorset that I had not seen before, namely a Tawny Pipit and a Whiskered Tern. With various other commitments the only day I could go was last Saturday, the day after we returned from Cornwall. The weather was forecast to be pretty horrific in the morning improving a little in the afternoon. So I took the dogs for an early morning very wet walk and waited for the birds to be reported which they duly were.
I decided to try for the Tawny Pipit first as I though this might be the harder of the two to get. After a drive of just over two hours through periods of torrential rain I parked at Cogden beach, a few miles west of Weymouth, and set off on the one mile or so beach walk eastwards to the reported map reference. I met a birder coming back who told me that the bird had been showing quite well on the beach but had flown to a grassy field and had been lost to view – great! Fortune this time was however on my side as the bird was back on the beach when I arrived and was immediately pointed out to me by another birder. Now I have to say that Pipits are birders birds, i.e there is nothing brightly coloured or flamboyant about them. Rather they are predominately brown birds with somewhat subtle differences between the various species. In fact one description of the Tawny Pipit I read said it was “an undistinguished looking species on the ground, mainly sandy brown above and pale below”, a little harsh I feel! The Tawny Pipit is again a displaced migrant but from somewhat closer to home than its Olive- backed cousin as it is found across much of mainland Europe. Getting good scope views and photos was made very challenging by the 50 mph winds blowing in from the sea so these are the best pics I could manage.
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| Tawny Pipit |
The plot of the 1944 film Tawny Pipit is about the rare event of a pair of Tawny Pipits breeding in England. As an interesting aside, and rather humorously, Eric Hosking’s footage of the pipits was actually of Meadow Pipits because he could not get genuine Tawny Pipits from German-occupied Europe!
After an hour or so I made my way back to the car and onward to Abbotsbury Swannery where the Whiskered Tern was located. It was truly artic at the swannery with the bitter cold wind seemly funnelling between Chisel beach and the coast into the swannery. A two hour endurance test failed to yield the bird as it was last seen flying west 2 hours before I had arrived. I could hardly blame it given the conditions so I settled for my one all draw for the day and made my way home. It was subsequently relocated the next day a little inland near Bournemouth.
I’ve also recently read a book called Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli which relays the story of the discovery and development of Quantum Mechanics in the early part of the last century. Heligoland is a small archipelago in the North Sea where Heisenberg famously found peace and solitude to develop his ideas. Its written in layman’s terms with almost no equations and is a compelling story of the development of quantum theory which turned the world of physics upside down and laid the foundation for many on the electrical devices we today take for granted.
Perhaps nothing typifies the strangeness of quantum mechanics more than one of Heisenberg’s famous equations that states that to multiply the position by the velocity of a quantum particle is not the same as multiplying the velocity by the position. Think about this for a moment, if you multiply 2 by 3 its exactly the same as multiplying 3 by 2 but not in quantum mechanics
Incomprehensible – you bet it is!
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