Never got round to seeing the Lincolnshire Steppe Grey Shrike, but tales and pictures of it perching on birders' heads, stealing shoelaces and coming on all point blank etc haven't left my imagination.
So armed with Ralph's satnav (the nice lady talked me right to the site, via a few odd backroads - thanks for the loan buddy), I belted down the M6 this morning and was at Wall Farm before 10.30am.
Unfortunately it was pretty gusty - hardly the best conditions for viewing a perchy bird like a shrike, and this Steppe Grey Shrike did not have the same tendencies of overfamiliarity that the Lincolnshire bird possessed.
It disappeared for long periods of time, and hunted low down in a raggedy hedgerow, usually obscured by vegetation, and perching only briefly.
Closest it came was about 60 metres away - no chance of a decent digiscope image, but reasonable scope views.
Black mask ending at the eye, pale lores and bill and dirty great big white wingflashes all pointed to a pallidirostris, and when it flew, its tail seemed very bright white and swishy - whole bird seemed paler than a Great Grey, but it was hard to be certain in the blustery conditions and poor light.
At times the limited mask was not obvious, presumably a problem caused by the bird's posture (see blurry pic above) and distance, so it was not hard to see why folk thought this was a Great Grey originally.
Mercifully better, but still distant, shots by Jim Almond have been posted at the Shropshire birding website's gallery.
A few other birds about in this bleak corner of Shropshire - Redwings, Fieldfare and Skylarks over, Common Buzzard and a fine couple of Crossbills (always good to see).
A Merlin sat up in the hedgerow for a time.
I gave the shrike three hours, but by that time it hadn't shown the slightest inclination to come any closer, let alone land on anyone's head (I had checked the twitch for suitable woolly hats earlier), so I headed back up north.
Eyes to the skies everyone, eyes to the skies...
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Yellowhammer again by Wicks Lane lake, Formby today.
Deer may be affecting some bird species on far larger scales than previously appreciated, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, provides evidence that the populations of several woodland bird populations fare worse in areas that have high, rather than low, numbers of deer.
The research led by Dr Stuart Newson from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) applied new methods of analysis to large national bird and deer monitoring data. The study focused on eleven woodland bird species in lowland England and their relationships with three widespread and abundant deer species: muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and fallow deer (Dama dama). The eleven bird species depend on low dense vegetation in woodland and scrub, and are therefore potentially vulnerable to browsing by deer which tends to reduce this vegetation.
There was evidence that increases in deer have been associated with large-scale population declines for five of the eleven bird species. Of these, it was suggested that the impacts of deer are likely to have been greatest for two species of conservation concern, the amber listed Nightingale and the red listed Willow Tit. These two birds have declined by 54% and 65% respectively over the last ten years.
Currently deer management aimed at reducing the impacts of deer typically takes the form of excluding deer through the use of various types of fencing and / or culling of deer. According to Dr Newson, “Our results emphasise the importance of developing co-ordinated national strategies for minimising deer impacts. With numbers and ranges of deer predicted to expand even further, it is suggested that such strategies should be targeted on areas that continue to support concentrations of species that are especially vulnerable to over-browsing by deer.”
This study is not suggesting that deer are the only, or even the main factor driving woodland bird declines; many other factors are potentially implicated. Nonetheless, these findings build on earlier experimental work carried out on nightingales by the BTO that has showed that deer can reduce habitat quality for this species. "More widely, growing evidence from other parts of the world suggests that increases in deer abundance may be depressing population levels of breeding woodland birds that are associated with dense understorey habitats." This study is important because it indicates that deer browsing may affect some bird populations on a large scale.