Hooptedoodle #238 - Juvenile Delinquency in Eastern Scotland

Mother Nature right in your face - I'm delighted to see the adolescent Roe Deer bucks starting to practise their rutting fights, but do they have to do it in our garden?

Also, if they are going to do it, could they please take a bit more time over it, and choose a morning when we have a window open, so we can get better pictures? This fight was a bit unfair, since one of the participants hasn't got his horns yet. No-one was hurt.

Things are getting a bit serious - the other morning we had eleven young deer in the garden. They appear to be very fond of our lupins.

[Photos by courtesy of Mme La Contesse Foy.]

Hooptedoodle #227 - Bufo Bufo

The wildlife in the garden and the adjacent wood is always welcome, but things are best advised to stay in the right places. More comfortable all round.

Yesterday's irregularity was this common toad, who got into the bird bath - presumably he dropped in from the wall. He seemed quite happy, but couldn't get out again, because of the slippery glaze.

So the Contesse rescued him. What to do next with him was less obvious. My personal opinion, for what it's worth, is that you should not form any kind of attachment to things you rescue. Nature is not so benign. If we put Toadie into the woods, he would most likely be grabbed by an owl as soon as we looked away. We don't have a pond handy, so we put him on the toad-coloured bark chips under the fruit trees, and he moved off inside the wire-mesh cages which (officially) prevent the deer from nibbling the trees back to ground level. This offered some illusion of protection, so we left him to it, and trusted that he would have a long and happy life.

Meanwhile, I am relieved to say that the pheasant breeding/fighting season is now over, and Algernon and his idiot wives have left our garden and moved elsewhere. Pleased to see them go - they are very noisy, from about 4:30am to about an hour after dusk, they make a mess (apart from anything else, they left quite a few stray eggs on the paths and the lawns - never have pheasants for parents if you can avoid it) and they forced us to stop filling the bird feeders (since they would stand underneath them all day, shouting for smaller and more nimble birds to drop some titbits for them).

I'm thinking of putting a sign up - VISITORS WELCOME, BUT PLEASE STAY IN THE RIGHT PLACES. That should sort a few things out.

Hooptedoodle #226 - New Star on the Farm

Not exactly wildlife, and not ours anyway, but there is a new foal on the farm, who is going down very well with the Saturday morning horse ladies, and is becoming a bit of a tourist attraction.

Just a couple of weeks old - this shot is taken about 30 feet from our front garden, so I guess he's a neighbour. Something of a reluctant photographer's model, since he likes to scratch his nose on a fence post, but you get the idea.

Everyone say, "aahhh!".

Hooptedoodle #218 – The Pheasants' Wars

It hasn’t been a severe winter here – it’s been long and dark and wet (for the first time ever, our front door expanded with the damp until it wouldn’t open), but not particularly cold or stormy, yet it is still wonderful to see some sunny weather as the year starts to roll along.

As ever, the bird-feeders are busy all day, and the perching customers, who are clumsy eaters, spill enough to maintain a steady crowd of ground-feeding chaffinches, blackbirds and other fellows who prefer not to eat while hanging onto something precarious.

Which brings us to the pheasants. The Rite of Spring is here, and no mistake. Deer were fighting in our neighbour’s garden this morning (it only looked like a rehearsal, to be honest), and the pheasants have now turned our garden into something very like Jurassic Park.

Algernon - Are you looking at me...?

We’ve always had pheasants here – they have featured in this blog from time to time – they are great characters, some of them, and we usually have the odd one wandering about, but their domestic and nuptial arrangements have always been carried on in private, in the woods behind our house. This year is different – we now have a family who actually live in our garden – in fact a more accurate expression would be “own our garden”. They have taken over. I have previously introduced Algernon, who is normally here anyway (he is the fellow who surprised us by surviving last December’s shooting parties – he returned after I had written him out of the saga). Algernon and his immediate family and friends have now requisitioned our garden. They are entertaining, but they are very noisy, and they are becoming something of a nuisance.

Some things to understand about the ring-necked pheasant, at least as we know it here in the Scottish Lowlands:

(1) They were introduced, centuries ago, from China (or somewhere), they are heavily inbred, and an adult pheasant has about the same intelligence as an average peanut. Officially, the hens nest under hedges and bushes, but in reality they make a very poor job of this, and frequently forget where they have left their eggs (to the delight of hedgehogs and similar). Our resident ghillie (gamekeeper) buys in many pheasant chicks each year – without this, I’m not convinced that natural pheasant demographics would sustain the population. If they died out in this part of the world I would miss them, of course, but what would the local farmers do with all those shotguns during the Winter?

Bad mothers - we will never know who left this egg on the terrace - they
refuse to do things by the book

(2) An adult cock pheasant can grow to something a little short of 2Kg, though they look much more substantial than that. They are aggressive, raucous, and have the aerodynamic properties and natural grace of a Christmas pudding. To put it bluntly, they are very poor flyers.

Note the fight damage on Algy's neck

(3) Mathematics. Algernon has acquired no less than five wives. The truth of the matter is that there are not enough females to go round. At 5:1, there is a desperate fight for mates. Algernon has a dreadful time trying to keep interlopers away from his hens – mostly unsuccessfully. There is a constant, and very noisy, French farce taking place behind our house.

Algernon is starting to look very ragged, and it’s hardly surprising. When his ladies are feeding, all together, he stands guard – often on one leg – glaring about for threats, real or imagined. This frenzy reaches its peak in the early evening. Two days ago, after tea, my son and I were outside doing some work on one of the bicycles when suddenly all hell broke loose. Algernon chased a rogue male right across the garden, and they both crashed head-on into the timber fence between our garden and Zebe’s, next door. If we had had a pond it would have had ripples on it from the shockwave. Then the fight spilled over into the woods – the fugitive escaped, but The Bold Algy collided with a tree trunk, and staggered back to his garden in rather bewildered triumph. The females were running about the place, shrieking, throughout.

This is not the sort of incident you can choose to ignore as you sip a relaxed glass of wine on the terrace – it’s really pretty alarming. No doubt things will calm down quite soon. Algy’s hormones, or his memory, will lose interest, or maybe he will injure himself seriously, and life will return to something a bit more normal.

On a gentler note, we have seen some more old friends in the garden. We haven’t had Blackcaps here for years – well they’re back; the Contesse has yet to get a decent picture of the female (who is similar to the male, but has a rusty-brown cap).  We think the Siskins have moved on now, but I thought I should put up some nice photos of them. Blackcaps are a variety of warbler, I understand - we don't get any other warblers here, so they are special visitors.

Mr Blackcap

Mrs Blackcap is a little more shy - she's just visible inside the fat-ball cage, with
a performing Bluetit trying to attract attention at top left

And some more Siskin shots...

Oh, how lovely, they all murmured.

Elsewhere, I saw about half a dozen Avocets flying over the farm fields - they are not really supposed to be around here - certainly I've never seen them before.

Avocet - library picture

Jedburgh Abbey - Family Day Out

Since Good Friday was bright and less cold than of late (not actually warm, note) we set off on a trip to visit Jedburgh Abbey, in the Scottish Borders, which is about an hour and a half from here by car.

Very pleasant day. It seems odd to say this, but the Abbey is rather larger than it was last time I visited, since some more of it has been excavated following the demolition of some old housing near the river. The Visitor Centre is simple, but the audio-guided tour is excellent - recommended - giving a good overview of the history and a useful explanation of life in the place.

Architectural style is hybrid - the lower parts of the building are Romanesque, but the upper parts, which were added only 50 years or so later, are of a more Gothic style - fashions were changing. The builders were Augustinian "Black" Canons - this order was noted for involvement in towns and communities, so their buildings were usually less secluded than those of some of their contemporaries. The Abbey has traditionally been a church for the townspeople of Jedburgh as well as a retreat for the Canons, so has always had an important role in the life and history of the town.

Since Carter Bar and the English border are just a few miles down the A68, Jedburgh has always been right in the firing line whenever there was war or skirmishing raids, and the Abbey has taken a few severe kickings over the years. It's remarkable, really, that so much of it survives.

In more recent centuries, it has gradually been requisitioned as a burial ground by the prominent families of the area - notably the Kerrs and Rutherfords - and this results in a rather confused picture of the original working plan of the building - altars and fireplaces being shifted and altered to accommodate tombs.

Anyway - if you are around the area, it is definitely worth a visit - but go early in the day, to leave enough time for afternoon tea in the splendid little Chocolate House in the town (which closes at 4pm - the mysteries of Borders commerce?).

Nearer home, the bird feeders in our garden continue to be frantically busy. In addition to the usual suspects, we have seen a welcome return by a very vigorous family of Siskins (who have been absent for some years), and we are also delighted to see a few Greenfinches, who have been badly hit by a fungus disease in recent times, but show signs of recovery, in this area at least.

It also goes without saying that I am deeply indebted to the Contesse for her splendid photography.

Hooptedoodle #200 - Algernon the Kingpin

This last week has mostly been a thing of threads and patches, dominated by a few moments of panic involving my aged mother (which turned out to be less serious than they might, but which consumed a lot of time, nervous energy and diesel oil). One relative bright spot has been the spectacle provided by our local wildlife, greatly excited by the Contesse's decision to keep the bird feeders stocked.

We have a long-standing tradition that our garden really belongs to the cock pheasant of the moment. Around this time of year there is a lot of fighting, though I'm not sure why. These standing champions are great characters - many of them have had names - the earliest I knew was Percy (circa 2000), then there were The Curate, a fine lunatic named Reg (short for Road Reg, because of his habit of attacking passing vehicles), Daft Baldy and many others. The current incumbent is Algernon - pictured at the top of this post.

One thing they all have in common is that they are very unlikely still to be around come the Spring, since there are numerous shooting parties here on the farm around Christmas (which, of course, lest we become too emotional, is the reason the pheasants are here in the first place). The brighter, the more splendid the specimen, the greater his chance of ending the day of the shoot slung over someone's shoulder, on a string.

In the meantime, there is much activity directed towards establishing seniority. The Contesse's pictures show moments from two simultaneous battles from last week. They look clumsy and ridiculous, but these boys mean business - great handfuls of feathers were blowing about after the fighting. The last of the pictures here has not exactly frozen the detail of the action, but you can make out one of the losers retreating in a vertical direction, to reconsider his tactics. They fly with no grace at all - lots of noise - like a demented bag of carrots.

We also had a further two incidents which were too quick to be photographed, alas. A roe deer came into the garden from the wood behind our house, decided our garden gate was too formidable an obstacle to jump and headed back the way he had come - leaving me floundering in his wake, trying to reach a camera. We also had a lightning visit from a sparrowhawk, which failed to catch a Blue Tit on the nut feeder, and which also failed to notice that a male Greater Spotted Woodpecker was sharing the feeder with the tit. One peck from the GSW and the sparrowhawk thought better of the whole idea - these guys are unbelievably fast, but I wouldn't back one against Old Woodie. The hawks seem to regard our feeders as a sort of buffet for their benefit, but they lack the finesse, not to mention intelligence, to take full advantage.

On a more peaceful note, here is a pleasing picture of a plump Song Thrush, with his beak all muddy from rooting around under the bark chips, looking for biddies. Not for him the peanut feeder - Thrushie likes his grub when it's still moving.

Hooptedoodle #196 – Donkey Award – Rewilding

It seems Anthony Fremont is alive and well.

If you are unfamiliar with Anthony, he is the central character from Jerome Bixby’s marvellous short sci-fi story, It’s a Good Life, dating from 1953, which I read when I was about 12 and which made such a profound impression on me that I have never forgotten it.

If you haven’t read the story, you should – or if you have 50 minutes to spare a nice man can read it to you.

[Very brief spoiler – Anthony is about 4 years old, and was born with supernatural powers which allow him to control the universe and read people’s minds. In the story, his village has been physically separated (by Anthony) from the rest of the Earth – no-one knows how or where – and exists in isolation, in a nightmare world surrounded by a four-year-old’s idea of a perfect environment – anyway, you should read the story, if you haven’t.]

The relevance is that it seems to me that the spirit of Anthony lives on in many present day conservationists – they mean well, but mostly they don’t have a clue. One of the difficulties surrounding environmental topics is that it is hard to find anyone talking sense about them – most of the enthusiasts are banging a personal drum, or quoting a half-article they read in the Daily Mail, or just letting their bellies rumble. Yes, we should be concerned, but we should try to keep a sense of proportion.

It makes me nervous, for example, that discussion of endangered species seems to be distorted by what is cuddly – bush babies and giant pandas get many more votes (and are better on TV) than disappearing strains of bacteria or cockroaches. It seems unlikely that the phone-in audience, unaided, are going spontaneously to come up with a balanced formula for a new, sustainable ecological system [you can help here – join Max Foy’s adopt-a-cockroach scheme – only 15 euros will secure you your very own specimen – yours is in Sumatra, by the way – here’s a picture of it].

The amateurs are mostly harmless, since they are unlikely to have an impact beyond their own Facebook timeline, and would not have the knowledge or the influence to take any real initiative. The professionals are much more scary, since they actually believe they understand what is going on, and what we should do about it.

One such is a chap – to be perverse, let us call him Anthony – who is proposing that we should reintroduce the wolf to the Highlands of Scotland. Yes – that’s right – not some kind of obscure wildflower, but that big, hairy dog-like creature with bloody big teeth. This gentleman manages a large forest estate, so he knows what he is talking about. He and his colleagues plant a great many trees, which are extensively destroyed by herds of wild deer, multiplying out of control, and thus requiring to be culled each year to keep things in some kind of balance.

The problem is that the deer have had no natural enemies (apart from men with guns) since wolves died out in Scotland around 1700. Our hero proposes to reintroduce wolves on the estate and – bingo – we shall be back in a better age. His vision is of a fenced nature park, along African lines, in which the wolves and bears (did I forget to mention the bears?) will keep the deer under control, the forest will prosper, and visitors (don’t tell me I forgot to mention the visitors?) will be able to enjoy the Highlands as they once were.

Monument to the last wolf killed in Sutherland

Ah yes – as they once were – and this will be Anthony’s own favoured snapshot, so they will not be under several hundred metres of ice, neither will they be swimming in lava – it will be just as things might have been on, say, 24^th May 1684 – or some other convenient date when there were still wolves.

As ever, I am disappointed to find that I am reverting to type and distancing myself from this grand scheme. I admit that I never was any fun at all, but I am concerned about the following:

(1) Wolves reappeared in France recently – in the 1990s – and things are not going well there – here’s a BBC article about the topic, and about our Scottish enthusiast, which sets some kind of factual context.

(2) If you were a betting man, how would you rate the chances of a fenced nature park containing the experiment indefinitely, without becoming some kind of Jurassic Park? When I used to live in Edinburgh, there were not-infrequent excitements in the Corstorphine area caused by wolves escaping from the zoo – cunning fellows, wolves – it is said that on one occasion they disguised themselves as cleaning staff.

(3) If the wolves escape (as they eventually must), how would things look for Scottish sheep farmers? – to say nothing of tourism…

(4) How did the rabbit get on in Australia, by the way?

Hooptedoodle #195 – Apologies – Yet More Nature Stuff

European Starling (sturnus vulgaris)

I am actually painting some soldiers at the moment, but progress is so slow that there’s nothing to see, as yet, so I thought I might push my luck one final time and try readers’ patience by sticking with this Nature theme of the last couple of posts (a very broad heading, since Apple Crumble was in there, somehow).

You may well have seen this YouTube clip – I am fascinated by it. Two girls went out in a canoe on the River Shannon, and they saw some starlings.

In fact they saw rather a lot of starlings, and the starlings were doing something which these days is called a murmuration, though as far as I know "murmuration" is really just a collective noun for a bunch of starlings, without any stipulation of activity. These events are spectacular – I’ve seen films of similar behaviour by a cloud of budgerigars in Australia, I’ve witnessed this kind of formation flying by starlings, and I think I’ve heard of knots and fieldfares doing the same thing. Anyway, I’m impressed. I wouldn’t like to be standing underneath them at the time, but there are some well-known locations where starlings do this sort of thing regularly – Brighton is one, I believe, also Rome, and we have a famous site fairly near here at a shopping mall car park at Gretna, in the Borders, which maybe lacks the romance of Rome, but it’s the best we can do, and you can buy a very nice sweater while you are there.

Maybe the requirement is simply a very large number of birds all doing the same thing? Looking at the shapes, it looks like a travelling probability distribution; I realise that this is a dumb thing to say, but my starting point is that the location of each individual bird within the envelope shape must be subject to some kind of probability function. I understandthat some steps have been taken to come up with mathematical models to simulate this behaviour, but success is limited to date. Of course, since I don’t have the tools or the knowledge to stand a chance of getting anywhere, I have become very interested in understanding more of what is going on! [If I succeed, I shall next attempt to fly to the sun with wings made from a Corn Flakes packet.]

Some thoughts:

(1) We see pleasing shapes caused by the forces of Nature all over the place – they are very common – clouds of water droplets in the sky, sand dunes, waves on the sea, snowflakes – you will think of better examples than these. The difference with starlings is that they are intelligent – each individual is trying to do something, not simply being blown about.

(2) Birds don’t seem to do this if they are going somewhere – when migrating, for example, they do form recognisable shapes (skeins), but not like this. Maybe, since the murmurations seem to occur at predictable times of day (at least they do at Gretna), and in particular seasons, the birds are feeding, sweeping a limited area.

(3) Though the cloud of birds looks chaotic from the outside, each bird must have a simpler view – they must be aware of their immediate neighbours, who are travelling in the same direction; apart from this they must be guided by – what? – the light?

(4) Scientists have observed that within the cloud the birds space themselves so that they are grouped not too close to their neighbours (so as not to restrict flight and manoeuvre) but not too far apart (to avoid loss of contact and the “collective” feel). This “just right” spacing is known as the “Goldilocks” distance, and it has been observed that lateral spacing is tighter than are the gaps to the birds in front and behind (which makes sense for safe manoeuvre – this sounds more like the traffic on the M25 all the time - well, maybe not the M25, but on a more sensible road).

(5) If a bird becomes aware of its neighbours turning, it can react very quickly, but the accumulated delay across a large cloud would be expected to cause the effect of elasticity and the waves which we see on the films.

(6) Early attempts at modelling the murmurations on a computer looked at what happens if the birds instinctively fly towards the centre of the cloud (the darkest area) or directly away from it (towards the brightest light); although the centre is moving, and may be moving in a different direction from any individual bird at any particular moment, it is not a surprise to learn that the models showed that in the second case the cloud would simply disintegrate as the birds at the edges flew away, and in the first case they would tend to collapse into a single point, though the Goldilocks effect would limit how far this could progress.

(7) Perhaps, then, the birds are steering towards some intermediate condition of light (and therefore cloud density) which gives optimal feeding?

You will note that I have not progressed very far with this! I do not intend to sign up for a night-school course, neither do I wish to melt my brain (more likely), but I am gently interested in how this works. Nature is wonderful – we don’t really need to understand it, neither should we necessarily expect to be able to understand it, I think – but these bird clouds look like mathematical shapes to me, and I’d be pleased to get a better handle on what’s going on - I have never been a starling, but mathematics is what I was once trained to do.