If you have no interest in reading about someone going into their latest 'rant' I'd strongly recommend you terminate your visit to Birds2blog right now as I'm about to launch into my latest one.
This isn't about being on the lookout at this time of the year for your first Wheatear, Sand Martin, House Martin, Swallow, the odd Osprey in the skies above, or Meadow Pipits over your head, this is another aspect of birds/birding, and not just about farmland birds.
Driving along the same route around 100 times in a year, I thought it time to check out what I miss from a car, so on Tuesday I spent 4 hours walking - dawdling and lingering actually - with eyes in every direction for 7 miles from Glasson Dock to Cockersands and return, I ended up with another of my 'where are all the birds' feelings, where are all the Robins, Wrens, Tits, and Finches.
Bearing in mind we all know the situation today regarding our farmland birds, twenty years ago when I started touring around the Out Rawcliffe/Pilling/Eagland Hill prime farmland areas on a regular basis - it gelled with my job - I soon built up a personal picture about the plight of farmland birds, and many is the time I left the area after one of these tours feeling pretty depressed about what I hadn't seen, having felt like I'd been on a trip through a desert, twenty years on and nothings changed.
OK, so on Tuesday I did see c.80 Meadow Pipit grounded in a field on Jeremy Lane, and saw a 'few' Tree Sparrow taking advantage of mans intervention with the helping hand of nest boxes between Haresnape and Gardeners Farms, saw c.40 Linnet in a stubble field, and best of all, at least 500 Golden Plover on the wing over the fields.
But here are the bare facts....Over the 4 hours/7 miles I notched up just 16 bird species, none of the other twelve species below went over a count on one hand, some were in singles....
Goldfinch
I don't really wish to go much further down this road, its a long road anyway, but the best example of just one reason why we are loosing our farmland birds - in some cases lost them - can be seen in the Cockersands area where the Lapwings are on territory in fields, and where - if past years and my observations are anything to go by - they stand little if any chance of successfully rearing young on account of intense agricultural practices, I've already seen one field slurried over Lapwings, and if the half dozen Skylark I saw choose the same area to breed in, the same fate awaits them too.
Bearing in mind we all know the situation today regarding our farmland birds, twenty years ago when I started touring around the Out Rawcliffe/Pilling/Eagland Hill prime farmland areas on a regular basis - it gelled with my job - I soon built up a personal picture about the plight of farmland birds, and many is the time I left the area after one of these tours feeling pretty depressed about what I hadn't seen, having felt like I'd been on a trip through a desert, twenty years on and nothings changed.
OK, so on Tuesday I did see c.80 Meadow Pipit grounded in a field on Jeremy Lane, and saw a 'few' Tree Sparrow taking advantage of mans intervention with the helping hand of nest boxes between Haresnape and Gardeners Farms, saw c.40 Linnet in a stubble field, and best of all, at least 500 Golden Plover on the wing over the fields.
But here are the bare facts....Over the 4 hours/7 miles I notched up just 16 bird species, none of the other twelve species below went over a count on one hand, some were in singles....
Goldfinch
Chaffinch
Skylark
Wren
Blue Tit
Great Tit
Reed Bunting
Tree Sparrow
House Sparrow
Blackbird
Robin
Kestrel
The End....Rant over.
Wot No Pics
Pete,
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of renaming my blog from - ''The Bird of Pittswood'' to - ''The Demise of the birds of Pittswood''
The loss of habitat here, and the rate it is being lost at is frightening :-(