Support feathered friends with eco-friendly habitats
Two different birds unrelated to one another dropped into my frying pan for a swim and brush up during lockdown. I snapped a picture through the kitchen window as the two splashed about happily in the only water for a mile around in these parched woods. Could you identify them? The bird on the right with a ginger cap on her head is a female blackcap warbler. In June she reared her young in their fragile cradle of woven dead grass stems. The nest was low down in a bramble bush 50 yards from this house. I heard the male singing away all through the summer from his perch in a sycamore tree.
I have recorded the numbers of every breeding bird here in West Dean Woods for nearly half a century and the highest number of blackcaps in these 40 acres of woodland has been ten pairs. Over the years they have increased from half that number in the 1970s and the answer is not hard to see. These warblers have learned not to migrate down to France and Spain any more. Not because they are hunted there in winter, which they are, but because English garden bird feeders supply them with all the winter food they need. The climate has also softened. They spend the winter in comfort now, some even as far north as Scotland. Quite a number are known in Southampton’s suburbia. They have shown a 400 per cent increase in breeding in Ireland and 100 per cent in England.
I have also recorded every single breeding bird in Kingley Vale Nature Reserve for half a century and the same applies there with a high of 12 breeding pairs of blackcaps 20 years ago in 2000.
So far so good. But what about the other bird in my photo. Have you identified it yet? It is of course a spotted flycatcher. This species has not had any of the good fortune as its fellow bather. It has declined by 88 per cent over the same period since 1975. Although it is still present in summer over the whole of the UK, even up to the tip of Scotland, it is in much reduced numbers. Spotted flycatchers, as there name implies, do not feed on garden bird
tables although do often like to nest near humans in country gardens. They will build their nest in a garden wall where a brick is missing or on the side of your shed, or in the ivy on a large garden tree.
You can hear the snap of their beak at 30 paces when they catch a fly. The males have a song said to be something between the twittering of a house martin and a linnet. The females hunt for tiny snails to boost their calcium levels when ready to lay eggs. She may decorate her nest with pieces of wedding confetti if nesting on the wall of a church. They are lovely, friendly little birds. But they are fading fast. One problem comes with the flight to South Africa in September. Droughts in the Sahel Desert in 1983 started the decline, as it did for nightingales and whitethroat warblers.
Overwintering in the humid zones of West Africa in no longer as safe as it was before deforestation. Here in the UK scientists think that predation by corvids and grey squirrels and the destruction of broad leaved woodland in favour of conifers have made the nesting sites outside garden habitats far less friendly.
This underlines yet again the need for gardeners to provide eco-friendly habitats. For instance, thick growths of ivy on upright structures like walls and trees can provide good habitats for flycatchers as well as overwintering places for butterflies.
I wonder where my friendly flycatcher is now. I hope it has had a safe flight south and will be back in the first week of next May.