Historic year for Scotland’s ospreys

In the late 1950s, when I was in my early teens, my scout group camped for a fortnight on the Rothiemurchus Estate near Aviemore. Our campsite was by the side of Loch an Eilein, which translates from the Gaelic as “Lake of the Island”. 

As a fledgling birder, I was intrigued by the island, because I had read that its ruined 13th century castle was the last British nesting site of the Osprey before the species was driven to extinction at the start of the 20th century.

What I did not know at the time — because it was then a closely guarded secret — was that Ospreys had returned to breed in Scotland. Since 1954 a pair had nested annually at Loch Garten, just a few miles from our campsite. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had taken on the responsibility of safeguarding the eyrie, mounting a 24-hour guard to defend it against illegal assault by egg-collectors. 

But then the RSPB had a brainwave. Instead of shielding the existence of the Loch Garten eyrie it could instead protect it through the glare of publicity, which would act as a deterrent to anyone with sinister intentions. The society built an observation site at a safe distance from the eyrie and welcomed the public to view the nest and its occupants through powerful binoculars (and more recently via live webcam images). The Loch Garten Osprey Centre became so famous that millions of visitors have now seen the magnificent birds at their nest.

But 2014 is a momentous year for Loch Garten not only because it marks the 60th anniversary of the Osprey’s return to Scotland but also because one of this year’s chicks will be the 100th to fledge at the site. 

The current occupants of the Loch Garten eyrie, Odin and E.J., have produced three young, which should soon gain their flight feathers and take to the air. They are all believed to be female and have been given the names Millicent, Seasca and Druie. The “cent” element of “Millicent” recognises her potential status as the 100th Loch Garten fledgling. “Seasca” has been chosen because it is the Gaelic word for sixty. And “Druie" comes from the name of the river that flows through the Rothiemurchus fish farm and probably provides most of the food for the osprey nestlings.

Over the past 60 years, Ospreys have gradually spread beyond Loch Garten to many other nesting sites, and they can now be found raising young not only at other Scottish sites but also in England and Wales. And I am pleased to see that one of the Scottish sites the birds have recolonised is a 13th century ruined castle on an island in Loch an Eilein.

Those innovatory nightingales

Ninety years ago, in 1924, the Nightingale contributed to two major technological innovations. 

The first development was the brainchild of a British cellist, Beatrice Harrison, who enjoyed practising outdoors during balmy evenings. In spring 1923, after moving to a house in woodland in Surrey, she was astonished to hear a bird join in with her alfresco performance. Her gardener was able to identify her accompanist as a Nightingale. 

The next year, after her debut broadcast for the BBC, Beatrice hatched the idea of broadcasting a duet with the bird. Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC, took some persuading, but at 10.45pm on 19 May 1924 the world’s first live outside broadcast was made from Beatrice’s garden. 

The audience for this BBC breakthrough was estimated at more than a million, and the broadcast attracted 50,000 letters. 

However, it now seems that the broadcast actually featured a well-known bird impressionist called Maude Gould. She had secretly been booked as a back-up in case the BBC equipment and crew scared off the real bird, which they clearly did. But analysis of later broadcasts, which continued for some years, shows that they did feature genuine Nightingales. 

In 1927 a gramophone record made from BBC recordings was another innovation — the world’s first commercial recording of any animal in the wild. 

In 1942 the BBC planned a new broadcast on the 18th anniversary of the first. But at the last minute the sound engineer heard a group of nearly 200 RAF bombers setting off for a raid on Mannheim, Germany. Realising that a live broadcast might help the enemy, he stopped the broadcast but asked for a recording. This was later issued as a gramophone record sold in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund.  

(The incident also inspired a 1975 album, Nightingales & Bombers, by Manfred Mann's Earth Band.)

Sadly, the BBC has been reluctant to commit to a 90th anniversary broadcast of live Nightingales. But the RSPB, inspired by the hundreds who signed a petition aimed at the BBC, is setting up a live broadcast of Nightingales from 8pm on Sunday 18 May from Northward Hill in north Kent (a site threatened by a nearby housing development that could  drive away these timid birds). You should find the broadcast here: http://www.rspb.org.uk/reserves/guide/n/northwardhill/nightingales-live.aspx 

And what about the other 1924 nightingale innovation? The Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was inspired to include a recording of a singing Nightingale in the score of his patriotic suite “The pines of Rome”. Its premiere on 14 December 1924 was the first use of an electronic recording as part of a live performance of a musical work. Since then, of course, recorded sound has increasingly been used to complement and enhance music written for otherwise live ensembles.

Sheer wacky

I live in north-west London, not far from Brent Reservoir (popularly known as the Welsh Harp after a long-gone waterside pub that laid claim to the lake more than a century ago). Next to the reservoir’s northern branch is a new housing development called Hendon Waterside, where some of the homes are reached via a newly constructed cul-de-sac that has been given the name Shearwater Close.

Presumably this name was intended to reflect the site’s waterside location, but the choice of "shearwater" is sheer wacky because shearwaters are birds of the vast oceans. They spend their lives far out at sea except when breeding, and they certainly don’t breed anywhere near Brent Reservoir. They make their nests in burrows on remote rocky islands, which they approach only under the cover of darkness.

Very few shearwaters have ever been recorded in the London area, And those that have somehow made it into the metropolis have only ever been seen on or close to the Thames rather than in suburbia.

Almost all London's shearwater records relate to the Manx Shearwater, which occasionally in autumn will penetrate the Thames estuary as far as Thamesmead. Extremely rarely, one may even reach a Thames Valley reservoir upstream of London.

But these inland birds often appear exhausted or disorientated. In 2008, a frazzled bird was found in a communal bin-shed in Paddington. In 2009 one was dozy enough to be caught and eaten by a Great Black-backed Gull near the M25 Dartford Crossing. And in 2012, another pooped bird was picked up in Kensington Gardens.

Only two other species of shearwater have ever been recorded in the London area — a Macaronesian Shearwater found dead in south-east London in 1912, and a befuddled Balearic Shearwater seen at a Thames Valley reservoir in 1984.

Although Brent Reservoir has birding records going back to its construction in the 1830s, no shearwater has ever been reported there. But the reservoir happens to offer a wide range of birds that could have provided an appropriate name for the housing estate’s dead-end road. Since the chance of spotting a shearwater near Shearwater Close is virtually nil, how about changing the road's name to an alliterative Coot Close or Cormorant Close? 

Or perhaps Cuckoo Close would more closely reflect the daffiness of the site's developers.

STOP PRESS: Since I wrote this piece, another species of shearwater has been recorded in London: on the morning of 15 September 2016, a Cory's Shearwater was seen and photographed flying south-west over The Regent's Park.  

What is a seahawk?

I have no interest in American football, but I happened to read recently that on 2 February the Seattle Seahawks won their first Super Bowl Championship, thrashing the Denver Broncos 43–8. Now I know what a bronco is, but what on earth is a seahawk? It is not a name used by ornithologists.

Before every home game, the Seattle Seahawks release a trained hawk to fly out of the tunnel ahead of the players. Their tame bird is an Augur Hawk (Buteo augur) named Taima (meaning “thunder”), but this African buzzard is not a seafaring bird and therefore cannot properly be called a seahawk. Its diet consists mainly of rodents, snakes, lizards, small birds, insects and road-kill — but not seafood.

Apparently the club wanted to use a trained Osprey (Pandion haliaetus), but because this is a native American species (although also found on almost every other continent), the US Fish and Wildlife Service would not allow its use for commercial purposes. So the team chose the Augur Hawk because it has vaguely similar markings. 

The name seahawk has occasionally been applied to the Osprey, but that description is inaccurate. Although its diet is mainly fish, the Osprey catches its prey in freshwater lakes, or sometimes brackish estuaries and sea lochs, rather than in the open sea. 

It has also been suggested that the term seahawk might refer to skuas rather than Ospreys. The skuas are a group of seven species of seabird that look more like gulls than hawks. Many skuas are kleptoparasites, meaning that they steal food from other birds. A skua will wait until a gull, tern or auk has caught a fish and then attack it, forcing it to drop its catch so that the skua can snatch it.

Skuas will successfully plunder the catches of birds several times their own size. In winter they obtain most of their food through such theft, but at other times of year they eat the eggs and young of other seabirds. The larger skua species also kill and eat adult seabirds.

If I played American football, I am not sure I would want to be compared to such a predatory creature.

Avoiding snarge

Have you ever come across the word “snarge”? If you have not and you have a delicate stomach, then STOP READING RIGHT NOW. 

Snarge is the remains of birds that have collided with aircraft — the bits of flesh and feather, blood and beak that are left smeared across a plane after a bird-strike. No one is sure where the term originated, but it is certainly an evocative expression.

The study of snarge is important in ensuring air safety, since collisions with birds can lead to planes crashing. A well-known incident occurred in January 2009 when a plane taking off from New York’s La Guardia airport hit a flock of Canada Geese at an altitude of about 3,000ft. The pilots saw their windscreen turn dark brown and heard several loud thuds. Then the engines died and the cockpit was filled with the aroma of barbecued wildfowl. The plane ditched in the Hudson River — luckily without loss of human life. However,  worldwide more than 150 people have died as a result of bird strikes over the past 20 years or so.

When a bird strike occurs, air accident investigators need to determine the species involved so that they can work out ways of keeping the birds and the planes apart, in the interest of both air safety and the survival of the species involved. They therefore sample the snarge so that the birds can be identified. The standard collection technique involves spraying the besnarged area with water and wiping it with a clean rag or paper towel, which is then sent away for analysis. 

In the US, some 4,000 snarge samples a year are sent to the Feather Identification Laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. When whole feathers can be retrieved, they are matched against the specimens in the museum's collections. When feather remains are too severely damaged for naked-eye identification, microscopes are brought out and the snarge is compared with thousands of slides of feather barbs. And if there is not enough feather even for microscopic comparison, DNA is extracted from the snarge and matched to a database of DNA records from tens of thousands of species.

A quackpot myth

On 7 February 2014, a new television comedy panel game show begins (or began, depending on when you are reading this) on Sky1, presented by Lee Mack, one of my favourite comedians. In each of the eight episodes, three celebrities aided by in-house boffins present weird “facts” and attempt to prove whether they are true.

The title of the show is Duck Quacks Don’t Echo. This is a reference to a popular belief that, er, duck quacks don’t echo.

The idea that the quacking of a duck does not reverberate, and that nobody knows why, has been widely repeated by such authoritative sources as Twitter feeds, online blogs, email trivia lists and even fruit drink bottle caps. The concept is, of course, completely quackers. Why on earth would the call of a duck be exempt from the acoustic laws that apply to all other sounds? 

But the myth is not so crackers that it has been ignored by academic researchers. I learnt recently that a few years ago acoustics scientists at the University of Salford investigated this fantasy with the co-operation of a duck called Daisy (species not disclosed, but presumably a farmyard-type Mallard), which they had recruited from a Cheshire farm. (I have no idea who was stupid enough to fund the research.) 

When Daisy was recorded quacking in an anechoic chamber and also in a reverberation chamber, it turned out that there was no echo in the former (which is, of course, why it is called anechoic) but a reverberant echo in the latter. Surprise, surprise!

If you wish, you can listen to samples of Daisy Duck’s various echoic and anechoic quacks at www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/acoustics_info/duck. 

Sadly, shortly after the university relieved Daisy of her scientific duties and returned her to her farm, she became dinner for a local fox and has therefore quacked no more. 

But how did the quackpot duck-quacks-don’t-echo myth arise? 

One theory is that although quacks may echo, ducks rarely loiter near suitable reflective surfaces. An echo is only generated if there is a nearby smooth surface, such as a cliff face, positioned at an appropriate angle to bounce the sound back to the listener. 

A second theory is that because quacking ducks — such as female Mallard and Gadwall — tend to quack fairly quietly, their echoes are too quiet to hear.