Firecrest!

Late this morning, just before 12, I thought I would go and have a wander around the woodland and Harris Garden areas of the campus to see what bird life I could see. The weather here has been fantastic all day so more than anything, I wanted to go and spend some time outside. 

I went to the Harris Garden first, and took a picture of the information sign that you see just as you walk in...

On Saturday's it seems that places like this on campus are very quiet, as I only saw one or two people wandering around and most of them were dog walkers. 

In terms of birds though, it really was alive with activity. Lots and lots of Blue Great, Coal and Long-tailed Tits were seen in flocks. The bird I was keeping my eye out for was a Firecrest, which has been seen on campus over the last few weeks, although I hadn't seen one myself. I thought I had seen it within about 10 minutes of being in the Harris Garden when I saw a tiny bird flitting around in some of the shrubs around the pond area of the garden, but a look through the binoculars showed that it was a Goldcrest instead. Still a good bird to see and a first for the university campus.

Also to be seen were a few Nuthatches tagging along with the flocks of tits, which seem to be quite numerous here on the campus. Most of the sounds I was hearing were coming from the singing great tits, which seem to be just as common, if not more common than the blue tits here. I wandered a little bit further down the path to see what more I could see. 

I then spotted what I thought was another Goldcrest in the vegetation in the fringes of the garden that backs onto the woodland on the other side of the fence. But a look through my binoculars revealed that it was in fact the Firecrest that I had been looking for! It really was incredibly striking little bird with really distinctive face markings and that vibrant orangey-red stripe on the top of its head. I had a great close up view of it too. Before I saw it, I had guessed that it would be difficult to tell it apart from a Goldcrest, but with a good enough view, it really was quite easy to identify as a Firecrest. There are few things more exciting for me than standing watching such a rare bird like this. A combination of this, the beautiful morning sunshine and the activity and birdsong of all the other birds around made me very, very happy indeed. 

I had my digital compact camera on me and I quickly took it out of my pocket, zoomed in using the 10x optical zoom and pressed record. Even though I was quite close to the bird, the small amount of zoom on my camera and the fact that the bird is so small meant that the bird only filled a very small amount of the frame. Following the bird with the camera was extremely difficult, and my filming was very shaky, but I'm glad to have got some footage of what is quite a rare bird. The video I recorded can be seen below. I included a slow motion clip at the end of the most clear footage I managed to get of the bird. The video really is quite poor but you can clearly see that the bird is a Firecrest. I really reccomend watching the video in 720p to see it as clearly as possible.



I also took a few stills of the video which you can see below:

I think this may well be the best bird sighting I get over the next few years here on the Reading University campus. It had previously been seen by a few people over the last few weeks, so it was great to have finally seen it myself. It's thought that this bird is probably a winter migrant, and could well stay throughout the winter. 

This got me thinking. It seemed strange to me that such a tiny bird had been seen so many times over the last few weeks. The university campus isn't exactly a small place, and you'd have thought the chances of seeing it are really quite small. So I reckon that there are actually more than one of these birds currently on campus, but until someone sees two of them together, it's difficult to be sure. However many of these birds there are on campus, I feel very, very lucky indeed to have seen one. There are supposedly less than about three or four hundred breeding pairs of Firecrests in the UK, so I'm very glad to have seen one. 

A few years ago, I went to Wendover Woods (a large coniferous woodland near to where I live back home) in the hope of seeing a Firecrest. At Wendover Woods, there is a small breeding population of them, but the one time I've been there, I haven't seen one. So that made it even more satisfying. Before I left to head back to my university halls I also spotted a Wren and a Green Woodpecker flying overhead.

This Firecrest sighting truly made my day, but now it's time to get on with some work for the rest of this afternoon. Have a great weekend and enjoy the sunshine wherever you are :)  

Not quite what I was looking for

A trip to Wendover woods occupied me yesterday. I went in the afternoon, and unfortunately, the place was quite busy, already reducing my chances of seeing some wildlife. It was busy, mostly because of picknickers, but as soon as we had walked a short distance from the car park and picnic benches, it was a lot quieter on the paths. The woods are great for birdwatching, and renowned for being home of a very special and rare bird: the Firecrest. However, I later found out that there were only 10 breeding pairs of Firecrests in the entire forest.

We arrived in the early afternoon, and walked on the nearly 3 mile-long "Firecrest Trail". According to the leaflet about the place, the tiny birds are heard more often than seen. They make a very high-pitched song. Unbelievably, we heard a song matching the description of that in the leaflet, but we later found out that it belonged to another very small bird, the Coal Tit. From a distance, I have to say that I thought that it was a Firecrest. With a closer look through the binoculas, I saw not just one Coal Tit, but at least 10 of them. Coal Tits are known to prefer conifer trees, and these woods were mostly conifers, as you can see in the photo above. Coal Tits are beautiful birds, but they are quite common, so it was no real surprise to see them. Firecrests are very rare where we live, so it would have been great to see one. Throughout the walk, we ended up seeing hundreds of them, along with a suspected Sparrowhawk, and some Long-tailed Tits. But no Firecrests. It was difficult to take a picture of the Coal Tits, because they were quite high up in the trees, and more timid than most that I see in our garden.

Below are some photos and illustrations of Coal Tits and Firecrests from the RSPB website. Shame they are not from my camera! Firecrests look very similar to Goldcrests, which sometimes causes some confusion.

Top image taken by me at Wendover Woods, and all others are from the RSPB website.