Snow and who's eating what.....

The snow yesterday (4th) certainly filled up the nest platform though it has mostly thawed today. In the surrounding countryside, there was a good five inches of snow and if you were feeding the birds in your garden and cleared some patches so the birds could get to whatever you put out, you'd have had plenty of visitors.

In my garden, blackbirds and fieldfares came for the apples I threw out, tits, sparrows and finches for the seed, a woodpecker, a nuthatch and some starlings to the fat blocks and collared doves, dunnocks and robins on the bird table and pecking about underneath the feeders.
Fieldfares certainly love apples and will come into gardens in cold weather if you put some out. I had 41 of them on Saturday, though they didn't stay very long, there being more birds than fruit! BTW, the fieldfare artist is Mike Warren, who lives in Nottinghamshire just to the east of us.

Fieldfares are taken by the peregrines but since they come to the UK in their thousands each winter to escape the cold of Scandinavia, their numbers are hardly dented by this minor mortality. Redwings, their Viking cousins, are also taken by our birds. They too winter in the UK in many thousands though they don't eat apples. They prefer berries if there are any left.
Joyce S, one of our watch point volunteers, tells me she had redwings in her Derby garden

feeding on holly berries last week. All the holly berries round me have long been eaten so redwings here have been turning to those of ivy, a nutritious source of food.
Feeding birds directly by putting food out and indirectly (by making your garden wildlife friendly) sustains birds and other willdife and gives lots of pleasure too. Well worth considering if you've never done it before!

Nick B (DWT)

Ps. Robert Gillmor is the redwing artist.

Pps. I confess the snowy cathedral photo was taken last year...I didn't get down today.

Arctic Derby

The weather remains bitterly cold in Derby. While the heavy snowfall of last week has been beaten down (and doesn't look much now, eg in my photo), it is increasingly difficult to walk along pavements which have become very icy and compacted. Similarly side and country roads are rather lethal!
Tonight's temperature is set to plummet to minus 10 degrees at best.

This afternoon both adult peregrines were on the Jurys Inn signs, one on the sunny south facing side and the other round the corner on the East facing side. They are well equipped to cope with cold weather. There's plenty of prey about. Today I found feathers of a teal and beak of a snipe below the tower.

Other birds are beginning to struggle.

This woodcock visited a suburban garden in North Derby one day last week. Remarkably it was managing to find earthworms in the soil below the snow. You may recall that woodcock are one of many species of wading bird that the peregrines take and that in December 2009, we managed to capture footage of one of the peregrines bringing back a live woodcock to the tower at 11pm at night, proving that these birds hunt after dark using the floodlighting.

Nick B (DWT)

Ps. A big thanks to Barbara M for providing the excellent photo, taken through her window.....

But February made me shiver . . .

It's been one of the coldest winters in Britain for many years, and the snow fell in earnest across most of England yesterday. It seemed the whole country ground to a halt for a few hours. (We're simply not used to temperatures as low as minus three Celsius, or snow as deep as ten centimetres!)



Up on the tower of Derby Cathedral our peregrine falcons' nest platform soon filled up, and the lens of our tower top camera was also buried in the white stuff. (If you've ever wondered why it's been dubbed "pudding cam" click here) But as is the way nowadays in lowland Britain, we rarely have to wait long before the snow and ice began to melt away. To peregrines, which are birds of mountains and cliffs, the cold and snow is hardly an inconvenience, and certainly something they can cope with well.

Dawn broke clear and beautiful this morning. And just as they now do on most mornings, one of our adult peregrines soon arrived on the nest platform at sunrise to reinforce its claim to this site. (07:30 local time) The misleading rufous red colouration you see on its lowermost feathers is due to the rays of the sun striking the east-facing side of Derby cathedral's tower. Click the play button to view the video above.

Nipping up the tower this lunchtime to check our video recording equipment, I was surprised to be greeted to a grey blur in the feed from "pudding cam", high up on the top. It made me wonder whether the bird was getting some benefit from the tiny amount of heat that this camera must generate - or perhaps it was simply trying to say "hi" to all our ardent webcam viewers out there. Perhaps some of you saw it peering out of your computer screens.

Update: Thanks to regular blog visitor, Lynne, who left a comment to say she'd seen some unusual activity on February 4th. We duly checked our video recording equipment for the date and time she'd said and retrieved the clip below of an adult peregrine pulling this prey item out from the snow on the nest platform, with its mate on the ledge below.




Nick Moyes
Derby Museums & Art Gallery

Website feedback minisurvey
How did you find this site, what were you looking for and what do you think of the experience?
Renaissance East Midlands works with museums to help them be the best they can for visitors, staff, volunteers and the community. We are keen to help improve museum websites by finding out how well they are meeting users’ needs at the moment.
Once you have finished your visit to this website, please spare five minutes to share your thoughts by filling in this quick survey. To say thank you for your help, you will have the chance to enter a prize draw for £100 at the end of the survey (July 2009)