The Hawfinches of the Forest of Dean

  

Hawfinch - Forest of Dean, winter 2017

A highlight of my winter birding is my annual trip to the Forest of Dean to see Hawfinches. I was unable to go last year due to the post-Christmas lockdown so this year’s visit was even more richly anticipated than normal.

 

Parkend in the Forest of Dean is my usual chosen location for watching Hawfinches. Here the proven technique of using your car as a hide normally works well. I must also say that,  after a number of quite strenuous twitches recently, I was also looking forward to a much more leisurely birding session!

 

The story of Hawfinches in the UK is, to my mind at least, a fascinating one. It is what is known as an eruptive species meaning that it occasionally erupts from its traditional breeding grounds to invade on mass countries much further away. This is thought to be driven by a combination of breeding success and local crop failure resulting in not enough food to go around. 

 

Records indicate that the Hawfinch was a very rare winter visitor to the UK up to the 18^th century. It would then seem that an eruptive event in the 1830’s resulted in a small breeding colony being established in Epping forest. This seed colony was clearly very successful as the Hawfinch subsequently spread across the UK’s forests such that by 1960 they had reached as far north as central Scotland. Sadly, along with so many other birds, there numbers have since steadily declined. In the autumn of 2017 another eruption event occurred with many hundreds of birds being found across the UK in unusual locations. There was hope that some would stay to bolster our native birds but, as far as I’m aware, there is no evidence that this happened, so the vast majority presumably returned to continental Europe in the Spring of 2018.

 

It is Britain’s largest finch and is most closely related to the european Grossbeaks. It has a huge triangular bill powered by exceptionally strong jaw muscles allowing it to open seeds that no other UK finch would contemplate including cherries. It is said that its bill can generate a load of upwards of 50 kg to achieve this! Fittingly for our largest finch, its Latin name is a real mouthful, Coccothraustes coccothraustes.

 

The other attraction of this trip is that the Forest of Dean is only 40 miles from my new home. I hence arrived on site just before dawn on Wednesday to find a couple of four wheeled hides already on location, but there was plenty of space for me, so I settled down to what normally is a good few hours of birding watching in order to get a decent view. At this particular site the Hawfinches mainly feed on the ground in amongst dense firs which limits the light falling on the subject. Having said that they do of occasionally come more out into the open where photographers spread seed. They also occasionally perch up on the outer branches of the firs proving a very photogenic opportunity. As I set up my camera I realised that I had made a major schoolboy error! I have got so use to using the lighter combination of 500mm lens with x2 converter that I had completely forgotten that I normally use my 800mm lens at this location. The normal disadvantage of the 800mm, i.e that it weights a ton, is pretty much nullified when stationary in the car hide and it allows me to shoot with it wide open at f5.6. The 500mm/X2 combination has a widest aperture of f8 equating to a factor of two less light or a doubling of ISO speed, i.e. more noise! Just to compound this silly error the Hawfinches stayed in the darkest of cover all most all the time they were present resulting in images like this heavy processed image.

   

Rather than these type of images taken on previous visits…

 

 

The seeded area, as always, proved very enticing for the local Coal tits and Nuthatches who made numerous visits to the seed during my visit

   

Coal Tit

Nutchatch

Oh well at least I saw the Hawfinches and that was the main thing after all. They did seem to be much more elusive than on previous visits, giving 4 or 5 short views only over the space of some 5 hours. I did take a brief break at lunch time to pop up to the church to see if any Crossbills were about but the only thing I saw of note was a colourful Jay feasting on peanuts that someone had put out. I suspect Jays are having a very hard winter as there was an almost complete failure of the acorn crop, their favourite foodstuff, last autumn, so, I suspect, this food boost would have been most welcome.

Jay

 

So a bit of a so so day but at least I had some good, all be it, brief views of the Hawfinches and perhaps this even gives me an excuse to go again this winter. You never know, I might even remember to take that right lens next time!

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!