Autumn in Derby

I took this photo of the cathedral, seen from Cathedral Green, early today (Sunday). It was a glorious if cold morning (I had to remove the ice from my car windows before I could set off).

The falcon (female) was sitting on a stone ledge just below the nesting platform preening herself in the sunshine.
Later I found a fresh pair of teal wings on the pavement below the tower. The teal is a small duck often taken by the peregrines. It moves into the Derby area in autumn and can be found on local gravel pits, lakes and reservoirs. The irridescent green speculum feathers on the wings are a giveaway......
When I got home and had eaten my breakfast, I went into the garden to take some recycling out. Suddenly I heard the sound of geese so I looked up and there in the bright blue sky above the house was a skein of over 200 pink footed geese flying East. A magic sight! These Icelandic birds had been seen an hour earlier flying over Stoke on Trent and were later seen over Nottinghamshire. They would be heading for the Norfolk coast which they would have reached perhaps by lunchtime. I bet the falcon looked up as they flew over her head!
Winter is certainly approaching......

Nick B (DWT)

Ps. Do look at the Clustrmap well down on the left hand side of the blog page. Double click on the map and it enlarges. Click again on separate parts of the map and, if you are following the blog from overseas especially, you may be able to see the red dot which represents you!
If you can do, please email us and let us know exactly where you are.
For example, I see there is a red dot in NW Spain near the Pyrenees. I was there in September and met a ranger at a wonderful wetland reserve called Laguna de Pitillas. If that red dot is you then do please get in touch - it would be great to hear from you....what have you been seeing at your reserve as the winter begins to bite? Have the cranes arrived yet?
Email wildlifeEnquiries@derbyshirewt.co.uk

Pps. Lovely email received from a keen web cam watcher in California this morning (Tuesday) - more on this later but meanwhile do please email us and let us know where you are....rest assured that we will treat your email with the utmost care and security.

Scottish peregrines satellite tagged

Many of you will know about Roy Dennis' Highland Foundation for Wildlife and the ospreys and other species that he has satellite tagged for a number of years.

Roy recently emailed me with details of another website he has started on which he gives details of the new species he has tagged this summer in The Cairngorms National Park.

They include two juvenile peregrines, a merlin and a hobby and the movements of these birds and other raptors can be followed on his new website which is :


http://www.raptortrack.org/peregrine-falcon/

The young peregrines are venturing further from their nest, though within the Highlands area.

The hobby, a true migrant, is now in Senegal though poor signals (due to lack of sunshine) failed to give Roy any track down through the UK or France until the bird reached southern Spain.
It will be fascinating to see where the young peregrines go during the winter. Will they go to the coast? Will they move south and if so how far? Might they come down to the Peak District, even visit Derby?
These are the first peregrines to be sat-tagged in the UK so the information they provide is ground-breaking.
The same is true for the hobby and merlin though hobbies have been tagged in Germany and followed through a whole winter in Africa. Amazing what can be achieved as the size of transmittors is reduced, allowing their use on smaller species such as the hobby and merlin.


Nick B (DWT)

Could Roy's birds come down to Derby? Time will tell......

Reminder: The urls of our two webcam pages have permanently changed. Follow the links on the top left of this page and remember to modify any bookmarks.

BBC AutumnWatch (and Webcam Link Change)

BBC TV's Autumnwatch gave our peregrine project an honourable mention this evening..

Shown below is our world-first video of a live woodcock being brought back late at night last December to which presenter Chris Packham referred. (Link to BBC iPlayer - for UK viewers only) 

It's a fascinating story, which also involved a snipe being accidentally dropped alive some hours beforehand, and the woodcock itself remaining uneaten and frozen for 18 day on top of Derby cathedral before finally being consumed. 

For new visitors who might like to read about the whole story, it's a tale told in two halves.
Part One explains the woodcock sequence and also shows it finally being eaten two weeks later

Part Two tells the story of how an incredibly unfortunate snipe was captured on the same evening.



Webcam changes

Please note that our two peregrine falcon webcam addresses have permanently altered this week, so you may need to alter your Bookmarks. The following two links will now get you there:

Multi-view: www.derby.gov.uk/dccwebdev/museum/peregrine/webcam.htm

Single view: www.derby.gov.uk/dccwebdev/museum/peregrine/webcam2.htm

Meanwhile the easy-to-remember link to our project homepage still functions at www.derby.gov.uk/peregrines

Our three webcams run 24 hrs a day, throughout the year. There's lots of action to be seen even at this time of year. Leave a comment on this blog to share what you've noticed. (All comments are subject to moderation, so  won't appear immediately)

Derby Festé - this weekend

If you live around Derby, you're probably already aware that our city's ever-popular annual street event, Derby Festé, hits town this weekend.

There will be three days of spectacular world-class events, all of which are free. The event kicks off on Friday evening with a mix of Bollywood dance, music and animatronic sculptures winding their way through the streets from St Peter's Street to the Market Place. (I'll be there - but probably not dancing!)
Cathedral Green itself is host to a number of amazing events during the Feste weekend, which ends with a Festé Wrap Party at Deda at 9pm. There are free workshops for the kids, lots to see and do, but don't forget to keep an eye out for Derby's peregrines, up there on the Cathedral tower, watching everything that goes on below. And if it all gets too much, don't forget our three city museums are a great place to unwind and relax.

You can download the whole amazing programme of events here or follow this link to visit the Festé website.

Webcam note: On Monday 27th September many of Derby City Council's internet services are being given new addresses. This could potentially affect our webcam availability at that time, and so we'll keep you informed of any changes or problems via this blog.

Bell Ringers Open Day

This Saturday (August 28th) is the cathedral bell ringers' annual Open Day - between 10 am and 4 pm and everyone is welcome.
There will be demonstrations (with plenty of noise no doubt!) and an opportunity to see the ringing chamber. This room is also where the peregrine IT gear is kept and the monitor will be switched on to show the live web cam views.

So do take the chance to find out about the bells, the carillon (left) and what bell ringing entails......it should be very interesting!

Nick B (DWT)

Report on the day by Roger, one of the bell-ringing team.
The bell-ringer's open tower open day was a great success. The weather was fantastic with blue skies for most of the day and even the brief downpour at 2pm was over by the time the next batch of visitors had reached the roof where, I'm told, there were clear views over five counties.

People came from a wide range of places including Derby, Nottingham, Windsor and Chester in the UK together with Latvia, the Czech Republic and the USA.

There were told about the history of the tower and its bells, with explanations and demonstrations of how they are rung, before having a go themselves. While they were waiting to ring they were treated to wonderful live views of an impeccably behaved peregrine who sat in full view of the pud-cam on the grotesques for nearly the whole day.

Even the clock hammer on the tenor bell was repaired so the crowd that gathered in the carillon room at 12 noon were able watch and hear the clock chimes and carillon tunes in their full glory.

Many thanks to all who came along. 

Ben Fogle Points The Way

TV personality and adventurer extraordinaire, Ben Fogle, helpfully shows everyone where Derby's peregrine falcons nest on the city's cathedral.
Ben came to Derby today to help promote a snack bar product on Cathedral Green, but was obliging and professional enough to pose for our camera. I thought about inviting him to abseil down with me the next time we nip down to clean out our peregrines' nest. But for this adventurer, who has trekked across Antarctica and rowed across the Atlantic, I suspect it would be a very minor achievement indeed!

Ben is probably most well known for his BBC TV progamme, "Extreme Dreams" in which he and his crew take a group of relatively inexperienced but nevertheless brave group of people into outdoor challenges that would tax most ordinary people to the limits. It's a fascinating programme to watch and even motivated my own 8yr old to create a winning piece for a school Easter Egg competition, as you can see below.
(Egg- stream dreams. Get it?)

Anyone wanting a Ben Fogle's autograph on a copy of our promotional Peregrine leaflet can have it if they bid over £10 towards the Project. Offers close at the end of this month and his signature will go to the highest bidder. Leave you genuine bid on our comments. (Autograph will only be sent once donation has been received.)

All quiet on the western front...

After the busy breeding season our adults are now in moulting mode and I've already found a couple of moulted feathers below the cathedral.

No recent reports of the two juveniles but having recently made a trip round the area to the east of the city (Chaddesden, Spondon, Locko Park, Elvaston and Alvaston) I have realised just how many pylons there are in that area....perfect for peregrines to perch on! Plenty of trees too of course but whether they use trees or not is a moot point.

There is a theory that peregrines that have been fledged from an artificial structure such as a church, cathedral, commercial building, pylon or even a bridge also look for a nest site on a similar artificial structure...so maybe our cathedral peregrines have an aversion to perching in trees?

Incidentally, in case you're wondering, when they breed on pylons they use the old nests of crows - and only certain styles of pylons seem to be used by crows. I did see one crow nest on a pylon in my travels...but no sign of either a crow or raptor there.

Meanwhile, the peregrine's smaller cousin, the hobby, is still feeding its young, two months after the peregrines were busy feeding theirs. Why the time difference?
Well, hobbies are migrants wintering in southern Africa (where they mostly feed on insects such as termites) and returning to the UK in late April and May. They also use old crows nests, nearly always in trees. Their breeding season is timed so that the young are growing up just when there are plenty of young birds on the wing - in particular, the young of swallows, martins and swifts.

(Young hobbies look very much like young peregrines, only smaller!)

August will see the young hobbies fledge and by mid September they will be on their long and solitary journeys south.

Hobbies are increasing in numbers in the UK and there are now about 40 pairs in Derbyshire.

They nest in farmland, using crow nests in lines of hedgerow trees or isolated trees in fields. They are very secretive birds and therefore hard to see. August is a good time to search since the fledged young can be noisy and, if you know of a swallow roost, hobbies will visit it at dusk as the birds circle round before flying down into the roost site (usually tall crops like maize, dense trees such as enery willow or reedbeds).

Nick B (DWT)