GA part 4: Simularities and Differences

Birdwatching in Germany, and in all the countries we traveled through to get there, is not so different from in the UK- after all, they are not that far apart. But I did see some similarities and differences, which I will now describe.


The same:

Buzzards and Red Kites- Just like at home, Buzzards were a common sight, soaring over the roadsides and perched on fences and trees, and Red Kites were a slightly less common but occasional sight.

Carrion Crows- Most of Europe has Hooded Crows (including northern Scotland and Ireland), but Lemgo had Carrion Crows like the rest of the UK, including the part where I live, does. I’d thought that Germany had Hooded Crows because I visited Berlin one winter several years ago and saw my first ever Hooded Crows, which seemed to be all over the city. But looking at distribution maps, Carrion Crows are found all year round in Germany and Hooded Crows are winter visitors. I never really thought of crows migrating, but there you go! So that was interesting.


There were less...

Large gulls- In the UK you always seem to see large gulls, like Herring and Lesser Black-backed, flying over roads or feeding on fields. Once we got away from Calais there just weren’t any more! It’s easy to forget sometimes that the UK both (a) is not very large, and (b) has a large amount of coastline compared with other countries. Black-headed Gulls were the only gulls seen on fields or following ploughs, but there didn’t seem to be quite as many. 

Collared Doves- I didn’t see a single one around Lemgo, not even in the suburban area where my sister lives, and the suburban areas are where you’ll normally see Collared Doves. Maybe the large amount of woodland nearby affected this?


There were more...

Kestrels- I really feel like it’s now hit home to me that Kestrels are declining in Britain, because my family quite often drives from the south to Newcastle and you see maybe one Kestrel in that entire 6 hour drive. The equivalent drive across the Continent had several Kestrels ever hour, it was really great and wonderful to see the ‘motorway falcon’ in numbers again, hovering by the roads.

Starlings- Flocks of Starlings were often seen flying over the road, more than you’ll see from a car in the UK, where it would probably be Woodpigeons you’ll see. That may just mean there are more Starlings near the roads though.


..And, as I’ve already written: 

Red Squirrels- None of these in my garden at home! *sobs* You don’t see ‘park’ squirrels in Germany, by which I mean those cheeky Grey Squirrels in urban parks that are very tame because people feed them from the hand, so you have to really catch your views of the Red Squirrels before they disappear, but it’s well worth it, especially for us sad Brits who miss our reds.

Goshawks- It was so weird to be in a place where these hawks that are so sought after in Britain are so common! I read an article ages ago that said you can even find them in the centre of Berlin, eating the Feral Pigeons. If I’d known about that on my trip you’d probably have had trouble getting me to stop sitting in parks looking at flocks of pigeons and hoping a Goshawk would come, and missing all the history and art and things. ^^


This last one isn’t a wildlife thing, but...

Small Ponies!- In the Netherlands, they really seem to go in for tiny ponies, and we saw several whole herds of them in fields and even in woods that we passed. I hesitate to call the, Shetland Ponies because they may well be a totally different Dutch breed, but that’s the sort of size and build they were. And they were soooo cute!

So that’s the last of my German Adventure tales, thanks for sticking by me if you read them all, and tell me about your travels! I’d love to know what wildlife you've seen, whether it’s at the other side of the world or a couple of counties over. :)

German Adventures part 1: What's in a name?

My sister is doing French and German at university and she's currently living in Lemgo, Germany, for her year abroad. Last month my parents and I went out there to visit her. Lemgo is in north-west Germany, and my dad doesn't fly so to get there we took the ferry from Dover to Calais, then drove through Belgium and the Netherlands to get into Germany. Five countries in two days! It was exhausting.

Of course, when my sister was settled in at Lemgo (she lives in a granny flat-type thing under a house), I had one question- 'what's the wildlife like there!' She couldn't tell me much, but from the minute I arrived I had my binoculars out, and practically never put them away. I was determined to find out everything I could about the wildlife of Lemgo, because I don't go to other countries very often and I wanted to make the absolute most of the chance to see wildlife outside the UK. On the day we arrived my sister had some exciting news: she had seen a Red Squirrel from her garden window that morning! On the second day of our stay we all saw one: a dark red, beautiful, tufty creature with a lovely thick tail, perched in the garden apple tree and then running off over the bushes with a piece of apple in its mouth. Germany never allowed Grey Squirrels to become introduced (I hear the closest ones on the Continent are in Italy), and it was wonderful to find out that the Grey Squirrel problem is not all over Europe. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that it wouldn’t be. Though Germany does have Racoons- descendants of escaped pets, apparently!

The weather confusingly went from being what my sister called ‘coat and gloves weather’ before we came, to a humid, sweaty mildness, though the leaves were turning autumn shades beautifully all over Lemgo. I couldn’t resist starting a small garden list for the view out of my sister’s window, after 15 minutes of watching produced Blue Tits, Blackbirds eating elder berries, a gorgeous male Bullfinch, a Great Spotted Woodpecker and a House Sparrow in quick succession. (The House Sparrow, a male with only a tiny black bib, appeared to be picking up nesting material- perhaps one of this year’s birds confused by the warm weather?)

The view over Lemgo from the park. Look at those autumn shades!

But things got even better! 5 minutes away from my sister’s place is a large, mixed deciduous and coniferous wood, and with the leaves on the deciduous trees changing bright colours, there couldn’t have been a better time of year to visit. Before we’d even visited the wood I got a taste of the wildlife there. While we were waiting for a bus near my sister’s home, I looked over towards the forest and saw a Buzzard circling over the trees, along with another soaring bird of similar size but which wasn’t holding its wings in the typical Buzzard shallow ‘v’. Looking through my binoculars I saw it was all white underneath, which most Buzzards aren’t, and had a longer tail which it did not spread in flight. It was, in fact, my second Goshawk ever! Unlike in the UK Goshawks are not rare in Germany at all; it has the highest number of breeding pairs in Europe apart from Russia, which is of course a lot bigger. Then later when I got the chance to visit the wood properly I happened to glance upwards, and there gliding above the treetops was another Goshawk, this time being mobbed by another bird, a Sparrowhawk that looked absolutely tiny in comparison. I love seeing mobbing situations that involve birds of prey mobbing other birds of prey, and this also gave me a great chance to see the size difference between Goshawks and Sparrowhawks, two species that are often confused in the UK but that there is no confusing when they are seen together!


I had heard that Goshawks were much commoner in Germany but seeing these two birds without any effort at all took a little getting used to, especially after all the multiple journeys and searching it took to see my first one in the UK. During the visit I was able to meet and chat to a German birdwatcher (my sister’s professor’s wife) who showed me all her bird books and we got talking about our favourite visitors to our gardens. She had seen Hawfinches in her garden! I told her about the Yellowhammers that visited our garden last winter, and the Sparrowhawk that had started to visit regularly (the male involved in last post’s clash of the titans, though he seems to have moved on at the time of writing), which I described as a hawk that is commonly seen in gardens. Using the book I was able to show her which one (the German for Sparrowhawk, awesomely, is Sperber), and she said ‘oh, I thought you meant Habicht’, which is Goshawk. Apparently Goshawks are seen in gardens, in Lemgo anyway! I think Habicht might translate as just ‘hawk’. I love finding out about different country’s names for birds. My favourite example of a different bird name was one of our hostess’s favourite garden visitors, the Wintergoldhänchen or Goldcrest, whose name translates as ‘winter gold chicken’. Firecrest, incidentally, is Sommergoldhänchen (summer gold chicken). The summer and winter parts make sense as in a lot of Germany Firecrests are summer visitors only, and while Goldcrests are found all year round, if it’s anything like Britain they are much more secretive in their breeding season, and a lot more visible in winter when the leaves are off the trees and they tag along with winter tit flocks. The part that really doesn’t make sense to me is the ‘chicken’ part. How can such a teeny bird be compared to a lumping great bird like a chicken? Very strange!

Stadtwald  Lemgo, or Lemgo town forest, with the evening light shining through the trees.

 It’s a good thing my sister isn’t that into wildlife as if she had been she wouldn’t have done any work due to spending too much time in those woods! I could have spent every daylight hour there, seeking out its feathered inhabitants. It was hard to find the birds in the deciduous parts as they were almost silent, but the coniferous parts were filled with little ‘see-see-see’ sounds. Being with family I often wasn’t able to take the time to wait for the birds to show themselves, but at one point I could hear flock calls above me and sat down to wait for a while. After a moment a small bird came into view, and I got an impression of a big, fluffy head, finely barred in white and black, before it disappeared again. I can’t be certain because I didn’t see it very well, but I think it was my first ever Crested Tit! Like the Goshawk, the Crested Tit in Germany has a much wider range than in the UK, where it is restricted to the Caledonian forests in Scotland. Speaking of different ranges, I later saw a Treecreeper...or it could have been a Short-toed Treecreeper, because their ranges overlap over that part of Germany, and they are practically impossible to tell apart by sight in the field. In some parts of Europe you can only find Short-toed’s, so it would be as easy there as it is in Britain, (where you can only find Treecreepers except for very rare vagrant Short-toed’s). So, my notebook just says Treecreeper for now! Maybe one day I will be able to distinguish them by call, if I somehow become well-versed in Continental birdwatching...

Tomorrow: some of the fungi I found in Stadtwald Lemgo!

Queen of the Forest

My next post here (after a hiatus in which I was spending all my free time making a costume for London Expo!) was going to be about the Black Headed Gull colony I visited last week, but something so exciting happened to me yesterday that I had to write a post about it before anything else. I saw my first Goshawk!

(The New Forest has a thriving Goshawk population and this is commonly obtained information, plus its a very general area name, so I will say that the New Forest is where I saw my Goshawk, but I won't write the exact location as the nests and adult birds are still persecuted.)

I had planned to head up to the New Forest yesterday for a bit of raptor watching, seeing as it was my day off and the weather has been so warm and sunny, ideal for birds of prey that like to soar on thermals. I checked the weather for the area and it said sunny and sunny with clouds, all fine and awesome. And then I woke up that morning to find it raining heavily. But I thought 'it's fine, the forecast's good for the New Forest so I'll drive down anyway!' ...and of course once I arrived it was raining there too. I had planned to drive down relatively early as the morning is better than afternoon in terms of bird activity, but I ended up sitting in Costa in Lyndhurst for an hour waiting for the rain to ease off. And every time someone opened the door I could hear distant thunder and I'm feeling pretty miffed at the weatherman. BUT sure enough at about 11, it started to ease off and the sky was brightening. So I jumped in the car and drove down to the raptor watchpoint, and took my telescope and tripod to the top, and by that point the rain had indeed pretty much stopped. And what's more, it didn't return for the rest of the day. So I forgave the weatherman everything. :D

I had decided to spend about an hour on the watchpoint and then head on to another part of the forest, so I set up the scope on shortened tripod legs in the hope that I could look through it while sitting down. It didn't really work so I ended up squatting, which caused no end of pins and needles but it was all totally worth it! Because then along the treeline flew a long-tailed, pointed-winged bird, clearly a bird of prey, and I assumed a Hobby at first. I had been practising getting the telescope onto birds quickly by focusing on Woodpigeons and Stock Doves that were flying by (this isn't easy at first, but you can do it by finding a distinctive looking tree near the bird with the naked eye, and then finding it in the scope), so I got the bird in view without too much trouble. Looking at it more closely I could see it was far too big for a Hobby, and not just big but heavily built, with 'fingers' at the ends of its wings (meaning that you could see the separate feathers pointing out), and had a brown back, a whitish underside and no visible falcon-marks (what I have taken to calling the 'moustache' markings Peregrines and Hobbys have on their faces). I dared to hope it was a Goshawk. Sparrowhawks are the big confusion species (or should I say small, because they are much smaller than Goshawks, but size is a real pain to judge at a distance) but it didn't look or behave like any Sparrowhawk I'd ever seen before. Sparrowhawks don't spend a lot of time soaring around, whereas this bird was gliding over the trees, interjecting the gliding with several powerful flaps. I was pretty sure it was a Goshawk, but pretty sure isn't good enough when its your first ever time seeing a bird you have wanted to see since your interest in birds started...you don't want a maybe then! Luckily I had a second opinion- I had just watched the hawk land in a dead tree, where it remained for a while, when the one other guy up on the watchpoint said to me: 'Did you see the Gos?' So there it was- if someone else thinks it looks like a Goshawk too then I know it's not just me being deluded! :D

Two more men arrived on the watchpoint and we were all watching when the Goshawk, who had dropped out of sight behind the trees, appeared again, and we were treated to extended views of this wonderful bird. While certainly not close to us by any means, it flew close enough that through the scope I could see the eyestripe marking on its face. Its back was a dark shade of warm brown, and the other watchers told me that means it's a first year bird- adults have grey backs. Large species of birds sometimes take at least a year to become old enough to breed, so I imagine this bird will be roaming for at least a year, learning to hunt well enough to support a chick and/or a mate, if it is a male. The more experienced people watching with me, who had all seen Goshawks before, were speculating about its gender and even wondering if the sightings involved two different birds, an male and a female. Female Goshawks are much larger than males, but size is very difficult to judge at a distance so it makes sense that they couldn't be sure. But they seemed to think it was probably a female we were watching. Hence the title of this post!

At one point while the hawk was in flight over the trees, a Stock Dove flew out of some foliage quite near it. It seemed to fly towards the hawk for a moment, before doing a double-take, turning around and flying as fast as possible in the opposite direction. But the Goshawk was on its tail! It chased the dove back and forth, as the dove kept making frantic turns as if trying to shake the hawk off. Sometimes it seemed like the dove would escape, as a quick maneuver would widen the distance between them, but always the Goshawk would narrow the distance in the blink of an eye and be close enough again to swipe at the dove with its talons. It was truly thrilling to watch. In the end they both dropped out of sight behind a tree, and the hawk did not reappear for a long while. I didn't see the moment its talons connected but I can make a guess that the hawk caught the dove, and spent the next hour or so plucking and eating it in privacy. The viewers on the hill had by now increased to at least 15, the numbers swelled by what was probably a birdwatching group, so the many observers made sure nothing was missed and everyone saw everything, including a distant Hobby, Buzzards, and Tree Pipits and Meadow Pipits doing their parachuting display flights all around us. The Goshawk was back in view about an hour later and was on the wing again. Just watching it fly was fascinating, this hawk is a master in the air. (You'd need to be to even attempt catching another bird in level flight! I never knew Goshawks did this and only thought the tiny, nippy Merlin could do so.)

So far this year I have been to this spot 3 times, in the hope of finding a Goshawk but never thinking there was any more than an outside chance, even though they live in the Forest. They are secretive and live deep in woodland, and are hard to tell from the smaller and much commoner Sparrowhawk, to the point that county recorders probably see more Sparrowhawk photos that someone hoped was a Goshawk than of any other bird. When it comes to illegal persecution by humans, the Goshawk is one of the most at risk, along with the Buzzard and Hen Harrier, because these species sometimes take gamebirds or their chicks as their prey. It was actually wiped out in Britain in the early 1900s, but had recolonised by the 60s, probably because of falconers birds escaping into the wild. It's like the reintroduction that conservationists would almost certainly have suggested anyway, as with the White Tailed Eagle, happened without them even trying! I love that. And the descendants of these escaped birds are certainly wild again now.

Finding a Goshawk for myself was a dream come true, and watching it for so long was just wonderful. I had never expected to spend almost 3 hours on that hill, but it was well worth it! And everyone I was watching with was so kind and knowledgeable. The birdwatching community can really be awesome. :)

*****************

A final note: I found a pair of Curlews later in a different part of the forest, and got to hear their wonderful call 'currrrrrrrr-LEW-cur-LEW-cur-LEW!) echoing across the heathland. I don't think I've ever seen Curlews so far from the coast before. They are a large wader with a long, curved beak that can be seen on coasts outside of the breeding season but breeds on heathland and moorland. I spotted them mobbing a crow from a distance and suspected their nest must be on the ground near where they were, so I gave them a wide berth in case I disturbed the nest. They still spotted me though and alarm called angrily as I passed. Their alarm call is like the bark of a small yappy dog!