The scarcer summer visitors

Hello

It looks as if we will be in for cool and grey weather conditions for the next few days with maybe a sunny interlude on Wednesday. It seems that these periods of grey, northerly airstream are now a regular feature of June and I come to expect Swifts, Swallows and martins gleaning the leaden skies in an effort to find flying insects.

The protracted cool and windy spring doesn't bode well for many of our breeding birds and already there are reports of Cuckoos, Swifts and other small birds beginning their migration south - it seems only a few days ago when they arrived! However John Hunt's excellent sustained efforts at trying to develop a colony of Swifts at Spratton are going well with four nestboxes in the village occupied this year and with young hatched in at least one of the boxes.

Spotted Flycatchers seemed to arrive in numbers in May but it appears very few have stayed to breed and presumably the majority have moved north to Scotland where they are still relatively numerous. I did see one today that was calling anxiously at Chapel Brampton, presumably one of a breeding pair.

This year there is a Turtle Dove census and observers have been advised not to publicise sites where they might be breeding. Some initial results suggest they were very late arriving (often well into May) and I know of a couple of places where they have been seen regularly in the county - I'm quite sure that the national figure will be frighteningly low for yet another summer visitor that used to be classed as common and found in a number of habitat settings. 

Cuckoos persist in the river valleys in Northamptonshire, often at gravel pit complexes and a few can be found in the bigger woods but with very few in standard agricultural/rural settings. There are still plenty in Scotland with good numbers on the moors and scattered birch/oak woodland. Preliminary data from the BTO satelite-tracking project suggests that the birds that migrate over the Mediterranean Sea via Italy (often using the Po Delta to feed up) fare better than the birds that use Iberia and France as their feeding areas before moving over the Mediterranean further west.

Interesting birds in the county today were rather limited to a pair of Garganey at Stanwick Pits and a first summer Yellow-legged Gull at Pitsford Reservoir.

Regards

Neil M

Common Swift.

Spotted Flycatcher.

Turtle Doves.

Juvenile Cuckoo.