Whiteknights Campus in Spring

I've now been out walking around the university campus before I've set off for work 4 or 5 times in the last couple of weeks. Each time I seem to have picked a sunny morning, and each time I've enjoyed the early morning walk. I even managed to get myself out of bed at 6:15 yesterday morning to get a quick walk in before I started work at 10:30 (I think this could perhaps be my greatest achievement of 2014). It is notoriously difficult to bring me out of my slumber in the mornings, but if I do manage to wake up early, I do like to be productive and make the most out of the day. 

This has other advantages too. When I left the house at about 7:00am for a walk around campus on Thursday (10th), I managed to capitalise on the beautiful early morning sunlight bathing the blossom of this (I assume), cherry tree found on the grass verge on our road. I was originally going to tweak these photos in Photoshop, but thought better of it, as I liked the effect I had created and didn't want the pictures to look unnatural.

The entrance to campus which I use is a little gate which is located at the corner of Whiteknights Lake. From this corner, you can get a great view across the surface of the lake, especially when the light is good, as it has been the last few days.

Depending on how early you get there and how low the sun is in the sky, you can capture the dew on the grass, giving the impression of a hard frost.

Both walks I managed last week, on the 10th, and yesterday on the 13th were good in terms of bird activity. Highlights on the 10th included lots of chiffchaffs and blackcaps singing all over campus, as well as hearing my first willow warbler of the year. Would probably have heard one earlier if I had been visiting my patch a few weeks ago. Also managed to see and hear both green and great spotted woodpeckers. The latter are very common, but its no guarantee that I'll see a green woodpecker, so it was nice to tick that one off. A group of 4 squabbling jays were seen in the woodland too. Didn't have a chance to have a look across the lake, so will probably have missed out a few duck species, but here's my list for the 10th (total of 30 species) 

Mute swan

Canada goose

Mallard

Tufted duck

Grey heron

Moorhen

Coot
Black-headed gull

Woodpigeon

Green woodpecker

Great spotted woodpecker

Wren

Dunnock

Robin

Blackbird

Mistle thrush

Song thrush

Blackcap

Chiffchaff

Willow warbler

Long-tailed tit

Coal tit (seen on way back to house)

Blue tit

Great tit

Nuthatch

Jay

Magpie

Carrion crow

Chaffinch

Goldfinch

The second visit which was yesterday was much shorter, so didn't manage to see as much (no coal tit, grey heron, green woodpecker, long-tailed tit or goldfinch). Did manage to add the following to the list though to see 29 species: 

Greylag goose (flock of 5 flying overhead)

Mandarin

Common pheasant

Red kite

I didn't really manage any decent photos on the first trip, though I had a great opportunity to try and photograph a very tame mistle thrush, found on the woodland edge. It allowed me to get very close (probably about 3 metres away), but I didn't really make the most of the opportunities I got. Also had lots of opportunities to take photos of blue tits on the first visit, but they're just so quick moving around that getting a decent shot with IS really is a difficult task. Both of these species allowed me a second chance to photograph them on the second visit though, which I was very grateful for. The only half decent image I managed on the 10th, was this robin enjoying the early morning sunlight.

On the second trip, one of the first birds I came across was a nuthatch, which are very common all over campus. It's usually easier to hear these birds than see them. When you do see them, more often than not, its at a distance as they tend to stay at the tree tops. I have included the very poor photo below just to indicate how tricky it can be to capture them. Having said this, I've just done a google search for nuthatch photos on Whiteknights campus and found this. I think I need to try harder nest time!

A little further on, I came across the song of a couple of blackcaps, and this one emerged for a few seconds to allow his photo to be taken: 

In the same tree as the blackcap, this blue tit was seen preening: 

I was very surprised to find the mistle thrush in EXACTLY the same place I found it on the first visit; in a small tree on the woodland edge near the agriculture building. It was clearly the same bird as it was incredibly tame. This time the light was slightly better and I was able to shoot at f/7.1, closer to the "sweet spot" of my lens. I was quite happy with the results. I wonder if those worms in the beak of this thrush were en route to a nest of hungry chicks...  

After this, I decided it was best to head back to the house. I managed a couple more shots on the way back though, including this rather acrobatic blue tit.

And this blackbird...

And finally, a non-avian surprise in the sky to grab my attention on the way back:

I'm really lucky to have all of this just on my doorstep here in Reading. Maybe I can get out a few more times in the next few days. 

Ah, something else I meant to mention- yesterday, I published a camera nestbox diary post for the 10th April, which had I had left half-finished for a few days. You can find this here. I'll see if I can get another nestbox update when I'm back home, but until then, you can see most recent update at the top of the sidebar on my blog, or via my twitter feed (also on my sidebar). As you can see, egg laying started on Saturday, and we now have 3 eggs in the box. Exciting times ahead!

Finishing Touches

Our blue tit female is now surely making the final additions to her nest in the camera nestbox. She still visits quite often, though not as often as she was about a week ago. The footage in the video below shows some of the visits she made to the box during the day on Wednesday 8th April. If she brings in any more nesting material I'm convinced its going to reach the roof! 

As always, watch in 480p if you can.



Going to keep this update short as I realise I'm spamming these nestbox postings a little bit. Back at the house in Reading now as I'm working Thursday-Sunday this week, so it'll be a few days before another nestbox update. Thanks for reading :) 

April Macro Photography

I was originally intending to go out in the garden and attempt some bird photography this morning, but bird activity at the feeders has been relatively quiet all day (although it began to pick up as I started writing this). Just about the most frequent visitor today has been a male blackbird who has been collecting worms from the lawn, and suet pellets from the ground feeder and taking them, presumably, to a family of hungry chicks. 

Also, the light early on today was quite harsh and bright, and there was quite a strong breeze, which wasn't perfect for bird photography. So I decided to head out with my 50mm lens instead and try and capture some of the colours that can be seen around our garden at this time of year. Due to the last few months being quite mild, the blossom and leaves are out on most of the trees here already. All of the photos in this post were shot with the aperture wide open at f/1.8; I really do love playing around with this lens as it allows for some extremely narrow depth of field, perfect for close-ups of flowers. 

One of the first colours you'll notice when walking round our garden though is the deep red of last years cotoneaster berries (the ones which haven't been eaten by the blackbirds that is). Throughout the winter, blackbirds and the occasional song thrush picked berries from this shrub, and more recently, blackcaps too. 

The blossom in the picture below was from one of the shrubs with overhangs into our garden from next door. No idea what it is- any ID help would be appreciated.

More ID help needed here; these purple flowers which I posted photos of a few days ago on this blog are growing under the swing frame in the middle of our garden. We did plant them ourselves but we can't remember what they are!

Onwards now to the blossom of the two apple trees we have growing around the vegetable plot area of the garden.

Just next to one of the little apple trees, a plum tree is also currently in blossom: 

These deep blue-violet flowers, grape hyacinth (Muscari latifolium) were seen on the railway bank at the end of the garden. Photo complete with freight train. Pleased to have timed that rather nicely. 

This patch of white coloured daffodils (Narcissus 'Thalia') quite close to the house are in full flower at the minute: 

And finally, some forget-me-nots, at the edge of the lawn...

So quite a range of colours for early April. I look forward to seeing more flowers appear as the spring goes on. 

I'm going to stop typing now before I fall asleep at the keyboard; do forgive me if I've made any howling grammatical errors in this post. Thanks for reading. :)  

Still Awaiting First Egg

It's almost as though the female blue tit in our camera nest box has finally realised that she's a tad early with her nest building, as she hasn't laid her first egg yet. In fact, she's still even bringing in some nesting material, albeit much less often now. There seems to be more of a thick lining to this nest than the nests of the great tits and blue tits of previous years. She's been bringing in feathers and fur to line the nest for a number of days now. 

The weather has been utterly atrocious here all day, so the light hasn't been good enough for the camera to switch from IR mode to full colour. Just going to show a still photo of our female blue tit settled down to roost for the night. Perhaps tomorrow will be the day that she begins laying her clutch of eggs. We shall see.

To make this post more worthwhile, I thought I'd add a few photos I took on Saturday morning when I walked around campus before I headed off to work. I start work at 11:00 usually, so this allows me to get an hours walk in the morning, if I can get out of the house by about 8. The closest entrance to the university campus is about 5 minutes walk away which is very convenient. Saturday morning started very brightly and got gradually worse as the day went on, so I'm glad I managed to enjoy the little bit of sunlight there was.

This great tit was seen in one of the trees overhanging the path around the lake. Believe it or not, this is the cropped version of the photo, which shows that the bird was quite far away. I do wish I had a lens with more reach sometimes...

Finally, here's a shot of an Egyptian goose swimming around the edge of the lake which I took on the way back to the house. A pair of Egyptian geese are always around on campus, although in this case I could only see one of them. Hopefully the other one turns up soon :(

Didn't see anything else particularly unusual whilst out on my walk, although it was nice to see a couple of great spotted woodpeckers, and hear a number of chiffchaffs too. Hopefully I'll get the chance to have a walk round campus when I head back to Reading again later this week. If I can drag myself out of bed a bit earlier, it might even turn into a proper full patch walk. That's a really, really big if though... 

Thanks for reading. 

The Update to End All Updates

I rather rushed back into blogging a few days ago after a few months of no activity. I just wanted to get a few posts up to get back into the swing of things. Thought I would use this post as a way to keep things in context, so that anyone who reads this blog doesn't get horribly lost. 

I'm in my second year at Reading University studying Environmental and Countryside Management- nothing's changed there- apart from the workload which seems to have increased a bit, especially since Christmas. Still enjoying it though and the content has all been thoroughly interesting and relevant. I've had coursework hand-ins throughout the year, more frequently in the last few weeks. I have my end of year exams pretty much straight after the Easter break in May, then by the start of June I'm done for the year. I'm living in a house just off campus this year with 4 other people, which has been very different to the experience of living in halls of residence in my first year, but fun nonetheless. 

Not sure if I've ever mentioned it on here but I also still volunteer for the local wildlife trust (Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust), helping out on their website. I do stuff like upload events onto their site, edit and publish blog posts on the site that people send in (mostly other volunteers and staff). I also help monitor their site statistics using Google Analytics, and do any other small website tasks that need doing. I used to travel to Oxford to BBOWT's HQ one day a week to do this work, but since my timetable changed after Christmas, I have no one day which is completely free, so I've been working from home since then. I suspect I won't be able to continue with this for too much longer due to the increasing workload from uni, and the important exams I have just around the corner.  

Its this voluntary job which helped me get a paid job with BBOWT working in a cafe at a place called the Nature Discovery Centre, just outside Reading in Thatcham, which I started in early December. I only found out about the job because an email was sent round the staff and volunteers email addresses stating that there was a vacancy which needed filling quite urgently. I work there on Sundays, although due to a couple of people leaving in the last month or so, I've been working Saturdays, and occasional weekdays too; this week I'm working Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The Nature Discovery Centre consists of a network of lakes attracting a decent diversity of birds, plus a visitor/education centre with a little cafe, which is where I work. 

The voluntary job has also helped me secure a 12 month paid industrial placement at Kew Gardens next year as part of my degree. The placement year slots in between the second and third years of my course, starting in August 2014 and finishing in August 2015. I had an interview there in December (coincidentally it was also my first placement interview), and a day or two later they got back to me to let me know I got the job. Obviously I was thrilled to hear this news, and the prospect of working for such a well known organisation is very exciting. Specifically, I'll be working in the "Tropical American Plants Team", helping to develop an identification database (called the "Neotropikey Database") for Latin american plants which experts in the local regions increasingly use. You can find the database here. I'll be working with IT specialists and taxonomists to help deliver tasks and also provide a feedback system for users of the database to help understand where improvements can be made. I still don't know everything that the job will involve, but I should get more of an idea on this the closer I am to starting. 

This job means that next year I'll be living in London somewhere with other placement students who are working in different departments. I'm excited by the prospect of living in London for a year, but also dreading the cost of living which will inevitably be huge. Exploring the green spaces of London will also be interesting, and hopefully some of the blog content over the next year or so will involve some of the wildlife I see there. 

So why is any of this relevant to this blog? Well at the minute, my schedule is pretty complicated, and hopefully the context I've just run through should help explain things better. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently on my Easter break from uni, which runs up until the 27th April. I'm still working two or three days a week at the cafe over the Easter break, but its much easier to get there from the student house in Reading than it is from my home back in High Wycombe, Bucks. So on the days I'm working at the cafe, I'm staying at the house in Reading. The days I'm not working, I go back home to Bucks. So basically, my time is currently being split confusingly between two houses. This means the kind of content I post on this blog over the next few weeks will depend on where I'm located. As I write this post, I'm sat in my room in the student house in Reading, as I've got work on Friday, Saturday and Sunday this week. I should be heading back home on Sunday evening after work. 

So in terms of nest box updates, I don't think I'll be able to post anything until Monday morning. I do have Dropbox set up as the destination folder for videos to be recorded in though, as I did last year. This means that any of the family back home can record videos on my old laptop, and they'll be sent to my Dropbox account and automatically downloaded to the Dropbox folder on my current laptop which I have with me here in Reading; I'll see what I can do.  

I'm going to stop going on about my life now because its getting boring just writing about it. Just wanted to explain a couple of the factors (along with lack of commitment), which have meant that posts on here have been few and far between over the last few months. I'll leave you with a couple of shots I took in the garden yesterday. Need some ID help on the purple flowers- the name is in my head somewhere but I can't remember. I think we planted them, so they haven't seeded themselves there.

Sorry for the dull reading today, hopefully I'll be back to more interesting topics over the next few days. Will probably struggle to post this weekend because of work but I'll see what I can do. 

Ah, I almost forgot... Over the past couple of days I've been adding a few posts to the blog archive, to try and fill in the gaps from last year. I've had pictures lying around from holidays and field trips that I just never got round to sifting through until now. Below are the links to the posts that I've been adding: 

• Skomer Island (part of a field course to the South Pembrokeshire coast in my first year of uni)- June 25th 2013
• Norfolk Summer Holiday 2013- 20th August 2013
• Lincolnshire at New Year- 6th January 2014

Thanks for reading. 

Sleeping Problems

The nest building process in our camera nest box seems to have gone very smoothly, with the nest being completed in such a small space of time. However, it is the behaviour of this blue tit at night which is perhaps the most interesting. 

For the past two nights, when she has come into the box to roost for the night, another blue tit has been heard calling outside, in pretty close proximity to the box. I assumed this was the male calling to the female; this pair has stayed very close to one another in the garden and its rare to see one of them at the feeders, but not the other. The male has, on a couple of occasions, fed the female inside the box, although I haven't managed to record this happening yet. The female occasionally replies to his calls with a tiny squeak as if to say "feed me". 

But the next part is really interesting. The bird calling from outside the box has, on the last two nights, flown onto the hole of the nest box just as the female has been settling down for the night. The reaction to this from the female was totally unexpected. She appears to start hissing at the intruder and spreads her wings out in a very defensive posture, similar to the way that blue tits protect the nest from predators. 

I don't absolutely know for sure that it was our male blue tit who is on the hole of the box, but the evidence seems to suggest that it is. He can be heard calling from outside the box, and the female clearly hears him, and replies to his calls on a couple of occasions. She doesn't seem too bothered about him being outside, until he flies onto the hole of the box. My theory is that the male blue tit (assuming that's who it is), is attempting to roost in the box with the female, but she isn't having any of it. I've never known the male and female to roost together in a nest box with a finished nest in it, so this wouldn't surprise me. Also, the reaction from the female, although quite animated, isn't as aggressive as one would imagine it would be if it were a) a predator on the hole of the box, b) another species, i.e. a great tit, or c) another blue tit individual to which she isn't connected. Perhaps this intruder was roosting in the nest box sometimes over of the winter, although I didn't see any signs that a bird had been roosting in the box when I cleaned last year's nest out a few weeks ago. 

To be honest, the more I watch it, the more I think it could possibly be another blue tit individual (not her partner), but I just think she would have behaved slightly differently if this was the case. Well I'll let you make your mind up yourself. The video below is a cut down video from a 20 minute recording I got last night at about 19:30 when the female enters the box to roost for the night. I have included a couple of clips where a train goes past the end of the garden (we have a railway line at the end of the garden in case you were unaware). She, like any other bird in our garden, is fully used to the trains passing by every 10 minutes or so, so usually doesn't react to it at all when she is in the nest box. She does seem pretty intrigued though, when a longer, noisier freight train goes past at about the 1 minute, 15 second mark. 

Also, she seems to have some serious problems with lice or fleas of some kind, because she's constantly preening herself to try and remove the creatures. On most occasions, you can even see the bugs moving around over her feathers. When you watch the video, I recommend turning the volume up so you can hear the male blue tit calling outside. Also, watch in 480p if you can, as its much better quality than 360p.

The second video below just shows a few clips recorded later on at night (about 22:30) showing the pretty serious parasite problem that she seems to have. She is never asleep for more than a few minutes before she is woken up by the lice/fleas moving through her feathers. It looks SERIOUSLY irritating, even just watching it. Although the parasites might not be harming her directly, she must not be getting enough of a sleep on her roost to maintain the energy levels needed during the breeding season. We'll see how it all unfolds, but I do worry about what will happen when the chicks hatch and the nest parasites are transferred to the chicks too.

Hopefully this issue with parasites doesn't affect the nesting attempt too much, but I fear that it will. Mrs blue tit is STILL adding material to the nest, albeit much less frequently now, which implies that she surely must be finished soon. Still worth remembering that it's early days yet, so it wouldn't be a concern if we didn't see the first egg for another few days yet. 

Thanks for reading. 

Red Kites in Early April Sunlight

You can't go more than 15 minutes without seeing a red kite soaring over our garden, or anywhere in The Chilterns for that matter. They're amazingly abundant, to the point where one might wonder how there could possibly be enough food to sustain their population. Its not uncommon to see groups of 10-15 kites flying overhead, scanning the area for potential food sources. 

On sunny days, they're a stunning sight, showing off their beautiful rufous plumage. They often fly very low over the garden too, allowing for some fantastic photo opportunities. Conditions today were perfect for photographing them, and one particular bird allowed me to get a couple of snaps. They aren't anything special, but it was nice to catch the bird in the good light. 

Very nice to be back to a regular posting schedule. The blogging bug just never quite goes away. Back tomorrow with more nest box footage. Thanks for reading and enjoy your evening.