Spring in the wonderful Wyre Forest

   

Pied Flycatcher

I essentially did no UK birding in April for a mixture of good and bad reasons. Bad because I was ill at the start of the month, good because we were on holiday in Tuscany for the second part of the month. While there were a few rare birds around, I luckily had all but one of them on my UK bird list so I didn’t feel too hard done by!

 

Counterintuitively, April tends to be a very quiet month for very rare birds. My wife jokes that I have a spreadsheet for everything and its true that I do like a bit of analysis! So, to back up my statement that April is a surprisingly slow month for mega rarities, here is an analysis of new additions by month to my UK list over the past 6 years. April is the lowest and May the highest closely followed by June and October. Here’s hoping that May 2024 continues this trend!

 

      

       

 

For my first UK birding trip for a month I decided to visit the beautifully tranquil Wyre forest just 20 miles from home. I arrived bright and early with just one other car in the small car park and was greeted by a wonderfully uplifting spring chorus of Chiffchaffs, Willow Warblers and Blackcaps. Walking down the made up road into the forest a Redstart flew across the road in front of me, a bird I always struggle to see well in the forest. I made my way to an area good for Pied Flycatchers and immediately heard the unmistakable song of a singing male. After a short wait he flew up into a tree next to me and continued his song. There is a rule of forest bird photography, for every 100 pictures you take 99 will have a twig in the way and indeed this was the case with this bright little chap.

 

After an hour or so I made my way to a spot historically good for Wood Warblers but there was no sight or sound of them. They tend to be one of the last migratory birds in and, checking my records when I got home, the earliest I have ever seen them in the forest was the 5^th of May. A good excuse, as if I needed one, for another visit in a couple of weeks.

 

I spent some time exploring parts of the forest I haven’t walked before while experimenting with the sound ID feature of my Merlin app. I haven’t used this much before and was amazed at how accurate it was, for example, it picked out a Garden Warbler in the background which I hadn’t noticed. It was more sensitive than my old sound damaged ears, alerting me to distant song that I would not have noticed and I will definitely use it more often. The only identification I would argue with was Iberian Chiffchaff but you never know whats hiding in the bushes!

 

I finished the day watching some fascinating activity at a nest box where a female Pied Flycatcher was nest building. The 1000mm focal length I was using for photography allowed me to keep a very respectful distance and watch her at work without disturbance.  I don’t know if she was a novice or just a bit dumb but she kept coming back to the nest box with material that was far to large to get through the small entrance. This frustrated the dickens out of her as she made many attempts to push the material through. It really did feel as though she was banging her head against a brick wall. I felt like shouting “turn your head sideways and then it will go in you silly bird!”. At one point she became so obsessed with a twig that was stuck in the ground that she spent ages tugging at it to no avail. During this whole time the male contributed precisely zero to the nest building activity. His sole intent was on keeping other males away and he ended up in more than one aerial tussle with an interloper. The only time he went near the nest box was when the female took too long, at least in his opinion, to come out. He flew up and stuck his head in the hole, perhaps to check she was not cheating on him!

When you wished you'd measured up before you brought!

  

Just to add to the cad image I’m creating for him, he is by very nature a polygamist!   He will probably leave this territory once his primary mate lays her first eggs and create a second territory in order to attract a secondary female to breed. If he succeeds in acquiring a second mate, he will typically return to the first female to exclusively provide for her and her offspring leaving the second mate and her young to fend for themselves! What a rotter!

 

I love my Cannon R5 camera but it has one extremely annoying feature. I tend to shoot on auto iso with a minimum shutter speed set. Very occasionally it switches to a fixed 100. It then drops the shutter speed right down to compensate and the first I know about it is when I find my images are ruined by motion blur. It did this to me on this occasion but luckily a few images were saveable.

 

I spent 7 hours in total in the forest what a wonderful and therapeutic way to spend a spring day!

 

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