Month: June 2017

The turring, purring turtle dove

UPDATE: The purring call of the male Turtle Dove was in halcyon days of yore very much the sound of the English summer, long before the Collared Dove arrived on these shores around the time of World War II.

It was with great pleasure that summer of 2018, we’ve been places where we’ve heard several. Dog walking in Rampton, Cottenham (South Cambs), and camping in Snettisham (North Norfolk). There were at least three not far from where we pitched our tent.

I should perhaps have saved this bird for the Christmas edition given its pride of place in the “The Twelve Days of Christmas” the familiar gift accumulation song of 1780, thought to be French in origin that has the generous benefactor donating “two turtle doves” to their true love along with various leaping lords, pipers, milkmaids, drummers and of course a partridge in a pear tree.

I’m afraid I’ve only got one turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) to give you anyway. This specimen had turned up on the day we visited RSPB Bempton Cliffs in June 2017 to see the puffins, gannets, guillemots, razorbills and others that live on the cliffs there. It was ground feeding among the jackdaws, chestnut-capped tree sparrows (Passer montanus), the more familiar, yet not native, collared doves, a pair of greenfinches (Chloris chloris), and a large brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) at the feeding stations close to the visitor centre.

The name of this bird comes from the Old English turtle, from the Latin turtur which is onomatopoeic given the bird’s purring call, trrr-trrr-trrrrr (as opposed to the more staccato coo-coo-coooh of the collared dove). The RSPB describes the turtle dove’s call as a “gentle purr…an evocative sound of summer”. However, it is not so often heard these days because of declining numbers, due to more efficient farming practices and a lack of wildflower seed and grain during its breeding season, habitat loss both here and in its wintering grounds. There’s also the issue of their being hunted in their millions on passage across Europe.

As such, the species is on the Red List of conservation concern. The RSPB offers farmers advice on encouraging this rare species here.

Bridled guillemot

TL:DR – The bridled guillemot is a polymorphism (not a sub-species) of the Common Guillemot (Uria aalge) found in the North Atlantic region.

Guillemot is the common name for various auk-type seabirds (Charadriiformes). In the UK, there are two genera commonly seen: Uria and Cepphus. Common Murre, also known as the Common Guillemot (Uria aalge) is a large auk with circumpolar distribution. It spends most of its time at sea. It breeds on rocky cliff shores or islands. The Bridled Guillemot is a polymorphism of the species found in the North Atlantic region.

Bridled Guillemot closeup, showing dark, chocolate-coloured head with white eye-ring and "bridle"

My photo shows a Guillemot at RSPB Bempton Cliffs on the coast of the East Riding of Yorkshire. If I told you that there is a species of guillemot known as the spectacled guillemot, you might imagine that this is she. However, this is actually a bridled guillemot. It’s not a distinct species but a genetic polymorphism of Uria aalge, the common guillemot (aka the common murre). This strain has thin white circles around its eyes that stretch back as a thin white line. By contrast the spectacled guillemot is rather distinct looking and has thick white circling around its eyes and no “bridle” and is Cepphus carbo.

Bempton Puffin

It’s a couple of years ago that we last walked the clifftops along the East Yorkshire coast of the Wolds spotting gannets, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, and, of course, puffins. The day we arrived coincidentally, RSPB Bempton Cliffs had featured on BBC Springwatch because they were opening their new visitor centre. It’s all well heeled in now and armed with the Sigma, I thought it was time I got some new shots of the seabirds.

First up, everyone’s colourful favourite the Atlantic, or common, puffin (Fratercula arctica). There were a few around but not nearly as many as we’d hoped and I don’t think we saw any chicks. Certainly didn’t see any with food in their mouths for the RSPB’s competitive hashtag, #ProjectPuffinUK. Here’s the shot that was closest I got to one.

The common puffin is an auk, the only puffin native to the Atlantic Ocean, breeding in Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Newfoundland, and many North Atlantic islands, and as far south as Maine in the west and the British Isles in the east. Although it has a large population and a wide range numbers have declined rapidly recently in some parts of its range it is rated “vulnerable” by the IUCN. It swims on on the surface of the sea and dives to feed on small fish.

Oats and beans and barley grow

The local fields of barley are, wave-upon-wave, like an opalescent green sea in the wind today, shimmering and shifting and stretching across the Fens. The barn swallows are reeling overhead and the skylarks are riding their aerial elevators up and down, tuning their on-board radios to their sweet Caroline in the fields below. And, then, there is this feathered friend.

Last time I posted a photo of a bird I thought was a corn bunting (Emberiza calandra) it turned out to be a linnet (Linaria cannabina) that wasn’t quite in full blush. However, this bird flitting around the barley field, ducking in and out of the wavering stems, then up again, swirling left and right, and from the nearside to the middle distance repeatedly is surely a bunting. In its manouevres, I presume the bird was pretending to land on the nest to distract me, the predator with the big glass eye. It would then wheel off to another spot and back and forth again and again. Or, maybe it was simply catching airborne prey and ducking down to deposit at chick central.

Although I was in plain sight, it chose at one point to settle itself, indeed verily perched itself on some vegetation atop the dyke, for a quick sing-song. It couldn’t have been any more visible if it had actually landed on my camera and asked for a bravo. To top it all, it threw its head up, beak wide open and sang across the barley. Anyway, it is a corn bunting.

Corn buntings are scientifically speaking Emberiza calandra but they’re also sometimes referred to as Miliaria calandra. The “calandra” is from the ancient Greek: calandra lark. Emberiza is old German, Embritz, a bunting. Although “ammer” is modern German for a bunting, as in the yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella).

The RSPB website uses E calandra, but the RSPB Handbook of British Birds (4th edn, 2014) (currently free with a new membership) uses M calandra…

Tornadoes and twisters

Everyone is talking about Cecilia Wessels’ photo of her husband Theunis mowing the lawn as a tornado looms ominously over the backyard at their home in Three Hills, near Alberta, Canada. My first thought was why is he trying to mow his tree, but my thought before that first thought was…surely, this is a missing 1970s prog rock album cover in the style of Hipgnosis or Hugh Syme…if there were flying pigs or a fire hydrant it could be a missing Pink Floyd or Rush album cover…

So, never one to not procrastinate when work needs to be done, I did a bit of a Thorgerson/Syme on the original photo with a few but and paste photos of my own – a blue tit, a police helicopter, a barbecue and some barbecue flames. I thought a nice title for my next foray into Geordie prog would have to be called “Aye of the Storm”.

And now the science(ish) bit: Tornadoes are rapidly rotating columns of air in contact with both the ground and cloud above. Stormchasers and others often refer to them as twisters or whirlwinds. Tornadoes often develop from a class of thunderstorms known as supercells. Supercells contain mesocyclones, an area of organized rotation a few kilometres up in the atmosphere, usually between 2 and 10 km across. They can be very destructive given that windspeeds within can reach 480 km/h. Other tornado-like phenomena include gustnado, dust devils, fire whirls, and steam devils. All great titles for the songs on the album.

Dave Bradley Photography

Check out my newly invigorated Instagram here.

Regulars to my social media will know that the birds carried on flying this year but I also added Lepidoptera in July 2018 to my galleries and reorganised Imaging Storm into tighter categories to cover all kinds of animals, events, macro photography and other photos.

Sciencebase regulars of these last (almost) three decades or so will know me as a science journalist, but I also write a few songs and play in a couple of bands. The third passion of my Science, Songs, Snaps, tagline is my photography, of course. I love to create photographs of all kinds of festivalgoers and bands at Strawberry Fair and the like, architecture, abstracts, and most recently birds, more than 100 different species in the gallery now, some of perched birds, others in flight, this gallery will potentially form the basis of my forthcoming book “Chasing Wild Geese” (free sampler available on request). Also taking my interest over the last couple of years Lepidoptera – moths and butterflies.

There are countless sites for depositing and sharing one’s photos online. Mine are scattered across Flickr, 500px, Facebook, GuruShots, Instagram and various others as well as on my Imaging Storm Photography website.

35mm-film-strip

UPDATE: I recently signed up for yet another photography website, GuruShots, users get to vote on each other’s work and there are prizes…I’ve taken up several of their challenges recently and am rattling up the ranks having gone from newbie to rookie in a couple of weeks…oooh! Subsequently, went from Challenger, Advanced, to Veteran, and thence to Expert and then Champion. Still to make the leap to Master and the final accolade Guru.

What would you rather bee?

Well, this might look, at first glance, like a bee, but look again, especially at those huge compound eyes, the mouthparts, and those wings – this is a hoverfly. In fact, it’s one of the biggest, as ID’d for me by friend of the blog Brian Stone – Volucella bombylans.

“One of the bee mimic hoverflies and you get two for the price of one. Same species has two forms, one like this (variety bombylans) that mimics red-tailed bumblebees (primarily Bombus lapidarius) and another with yellow on the thorax and a white tail (variety plumata) that mimics other bumblebee species (B. lucorum and B. terrestris). Although they use the bumblebees’ nests to lay their eggs they aren’t particularly harmful to the bees.” Brian has photos of the other form of this hoverfly on his blog.

This is an example of Batesian mimicry wherein a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species directed at a potential predator. English naturalist Henry Walter Bates first described this kind of mimicry in butterflies of the Brazilian rainforests.

Two cuckoos flew over no nest

Early evening walk (31st May 2017, farmland south of Rampton, Cambridge, relatively close to the Guided Busway), hoping to catch sight of our local fen edge barn owl (Tyto alba), but could hear a cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) in a field beyond a hedgerow…call seemed to be getting closer…at which point two males flew over our heads calling, each presumably attempting to out court any nearby females. Female song is very different from that of the male and not heard so often. I got a quick shot of one of the two as they passed overhead calling all the while and they separated in their ongoing search for cuckoo nookie.

The male’s call is familiar to many people even if they have never seen this thrush-sized bird that resembles a small bird of prey, but is neither thrush nor raptor.

Classic Chord #20 – Brown Sugar

For the 20th rock Classic Chord in the series, I thought I’d go for Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. Now, as you guitarists will mostly likely know, “Keef” (as in Keith Richards) does not play in standard EADGBE tuning, he (usually) plays in open G tuning, (D)GBDGD. The parentheses around his bottom string, because if I remember rightly he takes that string off to give him a more authentic Mississippi Delta sound than he’d get with that rumbling bass note.

Anyway, in open G tuning, the opening chords to Brown Sugar sound so much better than the inefficient way many of us have played it in standard tuning over the years. It kicks off with a C and G chords at the 12th fret. Barre the five strings with the index finger at this fret and rapidly hammer-on as you hit the chord with second and third finger on frets 13 and 14 on the B string and the D string respectively to give the C (which looks like a 12th fret Am7 with the top string muted). A lift off those two fingers takes us back to the G, then you dash down the fret board to do roughly the same thing again at the fifth fret (shuttling C and F major with the same shapes) and then up and down again for a repeat of the whole measure. The second guitar flicks in the pentatonic fill, although you can squeeze that in on your own if you need to.

The second riff is then similar but at the 8th fret (G and D chords) then down to the 5th again. Then full barre of the five strings at fret 1 (A major) and then fret 3 (B major) and on to the 5th with the hammer/pulls as required. Have a listen to my rough-and-ready demo of the intro.

This style of playing open-G tuning and fretting chords without needing to use your pinkie seems to be the foundation of a lot of Keef’s harmonies. Ad lib a few things with these basic chords and you’ll end up stumbling upon several Stones’ riffs, Start me up, for instance.

Ironically though, Brown Sugar is a Mick jagger song written in standard tuning and given the Keef flavour with his open-G tuning, his picking style, his string muting, the bandana, the leathered and weathered skin, and the ubiquitous ciggie to make it all authentic when you see the band playing live. (Been there, done that, didn’t waste money on the tee-shirt, St James Park, Newcastle, 23rd June 1982).

Credits: Brown sugar crystals by Genesis12, lip-bite by Lucy Burrluck

Eurasian Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus)

I suppose it was obvious in hindsight, it was RSPB Fen Drayton Lakes, there were reeds, there was warbling, it was a reed warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus). Despite his whitethroat and white rings around the eyes, he’s simply not a whitethroat (Sylvia communis). He wasn’t singing the whitethroat tune either.

Bird expert and friend Brian Stone explains: “Subtle but distinctive, the head shape is typical of the Acrocephalus warblers. Rather pointy with a steep forehead. That genus also tends to be very uniform in colour and many species are extremely difficult to separate if not singing. Fortunately we only have two really common species here and sedge warbler looks rather different.

Indeed, I had seen and identified positively sedge warbler recently at RSBP North Warren on the outskirts of Aldeburgh, north on the way to Thorpeness, and had seen said sedge warbler again not a few paces from the reed warbler.  Brian tells me: “Much more streaky and with a very bold face pattern. Reed Warbler goes much more for the no-nonsense brown on top, pale buff underneath approach.”