Wildlife Diary

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4th March 2010

Hook, line and sinker

Each year in the UK, some 8000 mute swans are treated for injuries of one sort or another, for example having flown into overhead power lines. But 29% (2320) of these have been injured by fishing tackle - usually getting hooks and line caught in their mouths or down their throats.

Other waterside birds such as herons, moorhens and kingfishers also get caught in nylon fishing line and many die a lingering death, hanging from bank-side vegetation.

My photo shows a heron that I found standing by the side of the road near my house one summer's day.

It was extremely weak and allowed me to pick it up.

I managed to get a huge pike hook out of its lower mandible but it had made a gaping hole in the flesh so I couldn't release the bird and took it to a vet. I never found out whether it recovered or had to be put down.....

 Ravens

 Ravens had been wiped out in Derbyshire by the beginning of the last century. Their former presence in the county is evident from the many local place names which allude to them. These include:

                              Raven Ho (Ashover)

                              Raven Slack (New Mills)

                              Raven's Low (Hartington Upper Quarter)

                              Raven's Tor (Wirksworth)

                              Raven's Tor (Tideswell)

                              Ravencar Fm (Barlow)

                              Ravens Clough (Hope Woodlands)

                              Ravens Leach (New Mills)

                              Ravenscliff (Fenny Bentley)

                              Ravensdale Park (Ravensdale Park)

                              Ravensnest (Ashover)

                              Ravenstone (Ravenstone)

                              Ravenstor Mine (Wirksworth)

Since the 1980s, ravens have returned to the county and now breed quite widely, even within a few miles of Derby City. They build on cliffs, quarry faces or in trees and are early nesters, often laying this month.

In March 2008 a pair of ravens turned up at Derby Cathedral, the first sighting in the city for a century. They stole some of the peregrines' prey and even took a few twigs up in a half-hearted nesting attempt before the falcons saw them off. Last week the same or another pair of ravens was again seen on the tower......but they didn't stay long.

Meanwhile the peregrines have been seen courting and the first egg is only weeks away. Hits to the blog soared to 50,000 in the first two months of this year due to the ‘night-time hunting' video, nearly trebling last year's figure.
On Monday, Nick Moyes made his annual abseil down to clean out the nest platform while one of the adults watched proceedings from the top of the police aerial nearby......
Surfing through foreign peregrine web cam sites, I was pleased to find links to our Derby site at a number of them including some in Poland, Holland, Italy, France and the USA. The ClustrMap below shows where folk were watching from earlier this week. (Note dots in mid-Pacific, China, Egypt, Algeria and Brazil!)

Lesser spotted spotted
On Tuesday, I walked round Kedleston Park near Derby, now owned by The National Trust. We were delighted to see a lesser spotted woodpecker exploring the bark of a lakeside alder tree. This male was silent but March is the time of year to look for this elusive and increasingly rare species because the males drum and call during these next few weeks before falling silent again thereafter.

These little woodpeckers are only the size of a sparrow and since they usually hunt quietly in the upper branches of trees, can be incredibly difficult to spot.

Other bird news this week: a drake garganey was at Carsington (an early returning migrant), a common crane flew over Beeley Moor and a bittern was still at Willington NR. The first sand martin and little ringed plovers were back in the UK this week, and it won't be long before they are joined by wheatears, chiffchaffs and a ring ouzel or two...spring is coming!

Wildlife Snippets:

*   A member of the NW Derbyshire badger group saw a badger chasing a fox in broad daylight recently.
He thinks the fox had probably strayed into a badger sett where there was a pregnant sow....

*   As yet there is no evidence that harlequin ladybirds have had any harmful effect on our British ladybird species. However, the species they are most likely to affect, the two-spot ladybird, has shown a serious decline in its numbers since 2002 - but this may have been due to other factors, eg climate. Harlequins are now widespread in this county.

 Text by Nick Brown

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