Early spring in the Wyre Forest

 

On Wednesday I met Jeremy just after dawn in the Wyre forest to look for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers. To cut a long story short, a few hours searching where they have been in previous years only yielded two sounds of them drumming somewhere but no confirmed sightings. There was quite a nice selection of backup birds to keep us entertained, good flocks of Siskin, a few Redpoll and my first singing Chiffchaff of the spring.

 

Just to prove they do sometimes show themselves, here’s a picture taken in the forest two years ago.

 

  

Come mid-morning we relocated to Dowles Brook to look for Dippers where we had much more success. We spotted two very active birds almost immediately collecting nesting material with huge beaks full of moss. Assuming they were the same pair, they had chosen a new nest location compared to previous years, possibly because the water level was much higher. This led us to speculate how big a territory is and whether there could be more than one pair. Somewhat unhelpfully, the literature says anywhere between 0.5 and 2.5 km depending on the availability of food.

 

Dippers are small, chunky, stout, short-tailed, short-winged, strong-legged birds with brown bodies except for a clean white breast.  Their name, and yes you’ve guessed it, comes from their bobbing and dipping movements. I think I’m right in saying that their ability to dive and swim underwater is  unique among passerines.  They are extremely well adapted to this niche with small wings that act like flippers and feathers that trap small bubbles of air providing thermal insulation. They have a much higher concentration of haemoglobin in their blood  than other passerines and a slower metabolic rate allowing them to stay under water for extended periods. They are quite happy diving into rapid and turbulent water which would surely drown any other  passerine. Their prey consist largely of invertebrate larvae such as that of caddisflies.

 

We noticed flood material wrapped around the fencing some 10 feet above the current water level. On the way back to the car park we chatted to the resident of one of the mill houses and he told us that during storm Babet the water level had been that high right over his ground floor barn window and he could not leave his house until it subsided. Don’t worry though – there’s no such thing as global warming – self proclaimed genius Donald Trump said so and he never lies!

 

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