BirdWatching-May19

swift action
How you can help save
these summer favourites
#My200BirdYear
Boost your
birding with
spring
must-sees
5
Britain’s best-selling bird magazine
birdsong
l Learn to decipher the dawn
chorus, from Robin to Redstart
l Step-by-step tips to boost
your song ID skills
l 10 of the best British birdsongs
to listen out for this spring
ID CHALLENGE
mystery songsters for
you to identify in your
own garden
6
RUTH MILLER
How the beauty of
a Bullfinch inspired
her lifetime of birding
just another gull?
Dominic Couzens finds out why you should look again at Lesser Black-backed Gulls
MAY 2019 £4.50

may
Contents
12
6
news & comment
14
16
17
Weedon’s World
Share Mike’s delight in seeing a
Kittiwake in an unusual location
NewsWire
Fund-raising appeal launched for
bird observatory ravaged by fire
Grumpy Old Birder
How do you fare when it comes to
digiscoping when out birding?
features
22
18
44
in the field
86
bird the world
70
74
Garden birding
Red Kites soaring above her garden
bring nothing but joy to Clare
Your View
The best of the month’s readers’
photos, letters and queries
on the cover
21 #My200BirdYear - boost
your spring birding
22 Complete guide to birdsong
35 The Swift - how you can help
these summer favourites
44 Ruth Miller - the beauty of
the Bullfinch
47 ID challenge - identify
six great singers!
66 Dominic Couzens on
Lesser Black-backed Gull
21
22
32
35
40
44
66
Five spring must-sees
Add new species to your
#My200BirdYear list
Complete guide to
learning birdsong
Follow our top tips and advice on
learning how to master the art of
identifying birdsong
Birding by sound
Tips on identifying birds by their
songs and calls
Swift action
How the city of Oxford is hoping to
reverse the fortunes of Swifts
Home help
And learn how you can help our
Swifts at home
A lifetime’s passion
Ruth Miller recalls the moment she
first fell in love with birding
Lesser Black-backed Gull
Dominic Couzens on why there’s
more to this seaside speciality than
meets the eye
66
6
12
47
53
Your Birding Month
Birds to find this month include
Quail, Turtle Dove and Nightjar
Beyond Birdwatching
The types of insect to find on
a warm, spring day
ID Challenge
Celebrate the dawn chorus by
identifying six great singers
Go Birding
Ten great sites to head to for
some brilliant birding
subscribe now
and pay
£2.80*
a month
– see p18
*when you choose the digital option
and pay by direct debit
79
86
89
Birding Italy
What to expect from a
birdwatching trip to the lovely
regions of Tuscany and Umbria
Birding Orkney
David Lindo on what he calls
“an underestimated urban
birder’s paradise”
Travel round-up
It’s exotic birds (and mammals)
galore on this Bird Watching
Reader Holiday to Uganda!
tutorial
114
99
102
94
95
Back Chat
Teenage birder Mya-Rose Craig
answers our questions
bird sightings
Rarity Round-up
The best rare birds seen in the UK
and Ireland during February
UK Bird Sightings
A round-up of birds seen in your
area during February
gear & reviews
90 Camera School
92 Gear
How to achieve great results in
David Chandler tries out a
bird photography
variety of clothing, from
trousers to a hat
Books
The best of the latest releases,
including: Endangered
WishList
Birding-related goodies this month
include binoculars and jackets
4 May 2019 birdwatching.co.uk 5

CONSERVATION swift boxes
NOW!
As you have read over the previous pages, our
Swifts are in trouble... here’s how you can help
words: JAMIE WYVER
Alan Williams/Alamy*
Swifts spend the winter months
many thousands of miles south
of the UK, sweeping over
sub-Saharan landscapes.
So, now is the perfect time of year
to put up a nest site for these avian
adventurers – ensuring they have
somewhere to nest when they return from
their epic journeys.
A life on the wing
Screaming parties of Swifts are a familiar
and welcome sight on warm summer
evenings when you will often catch a
glimpse of their aerial acrobatics.
They are at ease in the sky – feeding,
drinking, mating and even sleeping on the
wing. But they’re in trouble. Swift numbers
dropped by more than 50% in the last
20 years. The reasons behind the decline
are not clear, but we know that Swifts are
losing their precious nest sites. These birds
rely on nooks and crannies in our homes
and other buildings to make their nests.
New builds simply don’t contain the cavities
that swifts need and when older buildings
are renovated the gaps that swifts need
are lost.
Let’s do all we can to ensure
they remain in our skies for many
generations to come
Swifts in a nestbox
Nick Upton/Alamy
How you can help
Fortunately, specially-designed
artificial nest sites for Swifts
are available, providing these
birds with places to nest in new
and old properties alike. If
you’re interested in giving these
birds a home where you live,
work or study, take a look at
the following options:
1Install a ‘Swift brick’ – a simple
solution for new builds or
renovation projects. They fit
neatly in the space that a normal
brick would occupy in a wall and
provide the birds with a cavity in
which to nest. Swift bricks are
available online, and the RSPB
offers a free impartial guide to nest
bricks, available here:
http://bit.ly/2SP8M3p
3If you’re feeling handy, make
your own Swift box. DIY box
designs are available from
Swift Conservation:
http://bit.ly/2UtDgcY
and Action for Swifts:
http://bit.ly/2C9TZe5
Eyes on the skies
In order to protect existing Swift nest
sites, we need to know where they
are. The RSPB Swift Survey is
building up a map of Swift nest sites
and screaming parties across the
country. Visit:
swiftsurvey.org/rspb/home/index
to submit your sightings. Swifts
epitomise summer. Let’s do all we
can to ensure they remain in our
skies for many generations to come.
2Put up a Swift nestbox -
these are designed to be
fitted externally, sitting
tightly under the eaves. Boxes
are available from:
shopping.rspb.org.uk/swiftbox
BW
40 May 2019 birdwatching.co.uk 41

DOMINIC
COUZENS
ON THE...
Lesser Black-backed Gull
This seaside species is a great example of
never judging a bird by its name – there’s a
lot more to it than you might think...
species factfile
lesser blackbacked
gull
Scientific name:
Larus fuscus
Length: 52-64cm
Wingspan: 135-150cm
UK numbers: 110,000 breeding pairs
/ 130,000 wintering birds
Habitat: Coast
Diet: Scavenges a wide range
of food
FLPA/Alamy*
I
give you the Lesser Black-backed
Gull, the British bird with the most
off-putting name. Lesser – that can
mean inferior. Black-back is a clunky
rhyme. And talking of rhymes, gull
rhymes with dull. In most people’s eyes,
that’s exactly what gulls are – boring.
They are worse than that. Gulls are
noisy and lacking in airs and graces.
And for birders, gulls are a nightmare
to identify, which is the worst sin of all.
Did you think twice before beginning to
read this article?
The Lesser Black-backed Gull also lives
and dies by comparison. Where there is
a ‘Lesser’, there must be a ‘Greater’. The
Great Black-backed Gull is the bird closest
to a Hollywood heavy in a crime movie;
the species most likely to have tattooed
forearms. It has a proper identity as the
largest gull in the world. It swallows
Puffins and does other cool but cruel
stuff. The Lesser does none of this. It is
more closely related to the Herring Gull,
another bird with a clear role as the
clanging atmosphere-creator of seaside
towns, and the bird that shocks Daily
Mail readers by stealing chips from
holidaymakers, without asking. In
comparison with these strong characters,
is there something special to put forward
for the Lesser? There is.
Let’s hear the drum roll for… the bird
with the world’s most leisurely migratory
journey. Is that accolade enough? Some
scientists tracked Lesser Black-backs on
their autumn migration (from the
Netherlands to Britain, to southern Europe
or to north-west Africa), and found that
they only travelled, on average, 27 miles
a day. That, for any bird, is fantastically
slow – a Swallow exceeds that in an hour.
They could almost have walked. The
researchers found that the furthest any
individual gull moved on migration was
110 miles in a single day, which many
bird species exceed while just feeding
their young in a 24-hour period. This,
however, is for travelling a median overall
distance of 745 miles (adults).
Easily distracted
The reason for this extraordinary lack
of urgency would appear to be that Lesser
Black-backed Gulls are easily distracted
– so much so that you can imagine them
setting out with the best of migratory
intentions in the morning, only to come
across a tempting food supply and
thinking “Well, this is great, I can always
fly tomorrow.” Their recorded journeys
were haphazard, almost serendipitous,
with frequent changes of direction. If you
think about it, to move in a chilled way
like this is a smart migration.
Speed isn’t always necessary.
The very fact that Lesser Black-backed
Gulls make long-distance movements
down towards the Iberian Peninsula and
North Africa for the winter (occasionally
even well down the West African coast) is
a defining characteristic not shared by
Herring or Great Black-backed Gulls. The
former do make some movements, but the
numbers are not high. Great Black-backs
come to Britain from further north, but
equally don’t travel in big numbers
much to the south of us. Lessers are thus
list!
Add this bird to your
list !
Add this bird to your
Krystyna Szulecka Photography/Alamy
66 May 2019 birdwatching.co.uk 67

lesser black-backed gull species
where to see
LESSER BLACK-
BACKED GULL
Seen around the UK coastline and
on some inland high moors. The
biggest colony, say the RSPB, is on Walney
Island, Cumbria. In winter, look for them
over fields and at rubbish tips everywhere.
walney
Island,
Cumbria
Adult in winter plumage
in their own class as travellers, with their
relatively light build and long, elegant,
pointed wings. Large numbers are
summer visitors to Britain, of the same
ilk as Swallows and Cuckoos.
However, although many Lesser
Black-backs are bona fide summer
visitors to Britain, arriving in the spring
and leaving in the autumn, not all
individuals are; and, indeed, the picture
has changed enormously since the
mid-point of the 20th Century. Back in
the 1940s, very few Lesser Black-backed
Gulls could ever be found in Britain in
mid-winter – perhaps a few hundred.
But since that time, more and more
individuals have changed their behaviour
and, instead of going south in the
Juvenile still around the nest
autumn, they stay here, instead, now in
their tens of thousands. Although nobody
is entirely sure why this is the case, it is
certainly true that there are more suitable
winter roosting sites, with an enormous
increase in the number of freshwater
gravel pits and reservoirs.
At the same time, landfills, a great
favourite of these arch-scavengers,
proliferated from 1956 onwards, when the
Clean Air Act forbade the burning of much
Ed Brown Wildlife/Alamy
rubbish on tips, leading to the availability
of masses of organic waste – and Lesser
Black-backed Gull heaven. (This itself is
now changing, and many Lesser Blackbacks
are instead feeding over farmland.)
Leavers and Remainers
The Lesser Black-back is now a classic
partial migrant. Among the individuals that
breed at a given British colony, some will
migrate south from Britain in the autumn
and some will stay within our shores.
There are Leaver and Remainer camps
even among gulls, it seems. Some immature
birds in the first year of life actually stay in
their wintering grounds for their first and
even second summer, not bothering to
venture north if they aren’t going to breed.
Even among immature birds, however,
there are some that remain in Britain for
their first winter.
This is not the only big migration change
in the world of the Lesser Black-backed
Gull. Nowadays, it seems, part of the
population from Iceland, that would
normally come south past our shores, has
begun to follow a previously unknown path
to winter on the North American continent.
Once a great rarity across the pond, the
Lesser Black-backed Gull is now found in
Arterra Picture Library/Alamy*
every month of the year in North America,
across the whole swathe of the Eastern
Seaboard, right down to Florida. There are
confident predictions that it will soon breed
(if it hasn’t already) and colonise the east of
that continent. After all, it only colonised
Iceland in the 1920s, so why not cross the
Atlantic as well?
You might think that, in view of this
migratory upheaval, the important things
in the life of the Lesser Black-backed Gull
might instead remain the same – the things
of the home. Yet here, too, great changes
have been afoot, changes that would almost
be unheard of in most species.
When it comes to breeding, the Lesser
Black-backed Gull is traditionally associated
with coastal, flat areas, often with a
reasonable cover of vegetation – it tends to
prefer more plant growth than its colleague
the Herring Gull, for example.
So, there are large colonies on marramgrassy
sand-dunes in north-west England,
and on low islands, and sometimes also on
moorland some distance from the sea.
Studies have shown that Lesser Blackbacked
Gull chicks are better able to
conceal themselves from predators in such
places than are Herring Gulls, which tend
to rely on parents directly protecting their
FLPA/Alamy*
Insert your own phonetic
gull call transcription, here!
young. Herring Gulls spend more time at
the nest during chick-rearing than Lesser
Black-backs. What, then, can we make of
the Lesser Black-backed Gull’s colonisation
of cities, often very far inland (the West
Midlands, for example) by nesting on roofs?
This was another huge change in this
gull’s behaviour that also began in the
1940s, starting slowly but becoming more
significant, and still increasing in some
areas. There isn’t much vegetation on roofs,
but a big plus is that there are few, if any
predators. The gulls are especially fond of
large industrial sites with plenty of roof
area, where they can be colonial.
It is a far cry from a windy moorland,
or a sand-dune, but it clearly works for
this most adaptable of species.
When you look beneath the surface of
an apparently dreary gull’s life, you find
an astonishing capacity to change and
adapt: to change migration distances, to
alter migration routes, to feed on landfills
instead of catching fish from the surface
of the sea, to nest on roofs, to colonise
new countries and even continents.
This isn’t a ‘Lesser’ bird in anything
but name. Instead, it has an identity
carved out of its very aversion to
staying still.
It is, instead, the Dynamic Blackbacked
Gull. BW
look beneath the surface of an apparently
dreary gull’s life, you find an astonishing
capacity to change and adapt
Ashley Cooper pics/Alamy
David Chapman/Alamy
68 May 2019
birdwatching.co.uk 69

interview
A quick chat with…
Mya-Rose Craig,
AKA Birdgirl
illustrations: lauren nicholson
What first sparked your interest
in birdwatching, and when?
I was taken on my first twitch
when I was only nine days old,
to the Isles of Scilly, to see a
Lesser Kestrel. Then, when I
was 18 months old, I was taken
to see the Black Lark on
Anglesey. The bird came close to
my pram and, apparently,
I pointed and shouted “birdie”
with great excitement. That was
my fourth word.
Who was your birdwatching
inspiration or mentor?
I think that when young
children get to about three or
four years old, they realise they
are a separate being from their
parents and can make their own
decisions. That’s when some
birders find their children refuse
to go out birding any more. For
me, the difference was that I had
a much older sister. At that point
in my life, she was 15 years old,
beautiful, cool and obsessed
with birds. If she loved birds, I
was going to love birds.
Bird alone or with a friend?
I bird in my garden, the woods
close to my house and around
my village on my own. I go
dog walking in the woods
with friends, when I get to bird
at the same time. The rest of the
time is with my parents.
Your dream bird to see?
In the UK, a Wallcreeper.
There was one which overwintered
for two years in a
row in Cheddar Gorge in
the 1970s very close to where
I live, which would be amazing.
The bird I would most like
to see in the world is a
Harpy Eagle.
Your favourite birding spot?
In the UK, St Agnes on the Isles
of Scilly for its rarities, scenery,
beaches, friendly pub and just
our family ‘place’. In the world,
definitely Bolivia.
Your classic birder’s lunch,
grabbed from the petrol
station shop?
A large packet of Doritos and
a Divine bar of white chocolate
(neither have palm oil) to go
with my water bottle brought
from home to reduce on plastic.
Blackcap or Garden Warbler?
Blackcap. I have caught a few
in my garden bird ringing.
Favourite bird song or call?
Bittern booming down on the
Somerset Levels.
Birdwatching’s biggest myth or
misconception?
“Teenagers cannot be engaged
with nature”; I hear it all the
time. I have never met a
teenager who hasn’t connected
with nature when it has been
made relevant to them and with
the right role models.
The best bird you’ve seen?
My favourite bird in the world is
a Southern Cassowary which I
saw in Queensland, Australia.
They are 6ft tall, have amazing
colours on them, look like a
dinosaur and have 12cm long,
sharp, nail-like talons that can
kill with one kick.
Identifying gulls – nightmare or
a nice day out?
My Dad and I went to try to see
a very rare Slaty-backed Gull at
a rubbish tip near Rainham
Marshes in 2011. It has to be my
I don’t think there is a bird
that I find annoying, they are
just part of nature
worst birding experience, for
the long walk, the stench and
dipping two days in a row.
Your favourite bird joke?
There’s a bit in the film The
Big Year where Owen Wilson
gives a ‘knowing look’ to Jack
Black about a young loved up
honeymoon couple on the
flight to Attu. The girl clearly
has no clue what she is about
to experience and thinks she
is going to have a romantic
week away. We know it’s
a birding contest.
How do we encourage young
people to watch birds?
In 2016, I organised a
conference, Race Equality in
Nature, to look at the barriers to
Visible Minority Ethnic (VME)
people going out into green
spaces, what can be done to
overcome them and how we can
create VME role models. We
have two more conferences
arranged for June looking at
young VME people. The key
thing is to make it relevant to
them (not you). I also think that
outdoor child-led learning
should be available to every
primary age child, weekly.
Tengmalm’s Owl or Snowy Owl?
Snowy Owl 100%. Only
because I was in Spain seeing
my 5,000th bird species in the
world during half-term (a Rock
Bunting) and missed the
Tengmalm’s Owl.
The one place you’d love to
go birding?
I think the island of New
Guinea, for the birds-of-paradise.
A birding/conservation issue
you feel strongly about?
Equality in nature, conservation and
the environment. Everyone in the
UK has the right to access nature,
like they do education or health.
The bird that annoys you most?
I don’t think there is a bird that I
find annoying, they are just part
of nature.
Bogey bird that still eludes you?
Little Auk.
The bird book you’d never be
without?
In the UK, Collins Bird Guide. In
the world, the field guide to
wherever we are.
Why do you love birdwatching,
in three words?
Sword-billed Hummingbird
Advice for birders taking part in
#My200BirdYear?
I know this is all about seeing
birds locally, which is great for
the environment, so try to go to
one place with a group of
birders, so that you get the most
out of the miles that you drive.
Secondly, have fun!
About Mya-Rose
n The sixteen-year-old birder is
considered the youngest person to
have seen 5,000 bird species
after touring the world.
You can follow her
on Twitter:
@BirdgirlUK
114 May 2019