Stejneger’s Stonechat—in Hong Kong last week

From Hong Kong last week came this photograph of a male stonechat. Taxonomy of the stonechats of Eurasia is mighty complicated and this one is known at present as Stejneger’s Stonechat, Saxicola stejnegeri.

I say mighty complicated because to old Hong Kong birders this was called the Siberian Stonechat, S. maurus and sometimes as an eastern race of the Common Stonechat, S. torquatus. Since some of the evidence that recognises the form found in Hong Kong as a passage migrant and winter visitor from its breeding grounds in north-east China, is based on differences in mitochondrial and not nuclear DNA, I am not sure that the present taxonomy will hold sway for that long.

Stejneger was the Norwegian-born Leonhard Hess Stejneger (1851-1943) who made his name in the U.S.A. mainly as a herpetologist working at the Smithsonian. The pronunciation of Stejneger always offers a challenge to Brits. Here, apparently, is the way it should sound.

Beautiful bird.

Crimson Finch - a beautiful Australian bird

I couldn’t resist taking video of Crimson Finches while birdwatching along the edge of Lily Creek Lagoon in Kununnura, on the eastern edge of the Kimberley in Western Australia earlier this year.

The Crimson Finch (Neochmia phaeton) occurs in tropical Australia and a small area of New Guinea. ‘Finch’ is of course a misnomer. It, along with all Australian ‘finches’ is an estrildid, like the waxbills of Africa. Seed forms the bulk of their diet but insects, as a richer protein supply, are taken in the breeding season. All the books say they occur along water courses and those in the video were in the thick vegetation surrounding the lagoon.

The males in particular were shining in the sunlight and were living up to their specific name of ‘phaeton’ - Greek for radiant or shining. Three subspecies have been defined and the ones we saw are in the range of N. phaeton phaeton.

Here is the distribution map of the species adapted from the late Derek Goodwin’s book, Estrildid Finches of the World, published in 1982 by the British Museum (Natural History):

The great fall of migrants on the Suffolk coast in September 1965; we were there

Male Bluethroat (Luscinia svecica)
photographed in Moscow
(from Wikipedia**)

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of a remarkable wildlife phenomenon on the Suffolk coast in the east of England. And we were there at the time.

As we approached the coast at Benacre on foot, we suddenly noticed that there were lots of birds around and that these birds were not the usual birds one might expect to see. In short, the shrubs and bushes were full of migrants and rare migrants at that. One bush had Bluethroats on nearly every branch and a Wryneck in the middle. There were Redstarts; Pied Flycatchers were abundant and a variety of small warblers skulked in the low shrubs and bushes. It was an amazing sight. Wherever we walked there were more and more birds.

A few days later when we returned they had all gone.

The ‘fall’ of migrants made the local weekly newspaper because Lowestoft, the town to the north, had been brought to a halt as exhausted migrants landed on buildings, roads and paths. in a post on Birdforum from 2008, a correspondent quoted from Birds and Weather: A Birdwatcher’s Guide by Stephen Moss (Hamlyn, 1995):

At just after two o'clock in the afternoon of 3rd September 1965, the residents of Lowestoft looked up to see a vast cloud of small birds overhead. Birds were dropping out of the clouds like raindrops, and soon the town was alive with them, in gardens, on the beach, and even in the roads, where many fell victim to traffic. Two people, in different parts of the town, actually had Redstarts alighting on their shoulders from the sky.

     Tens of thousands of birds were involved. All along the Suffolk and Norfolk coasts, great flocks of Northern Wheatears and Whinchats, Redstarts and Pied Flycatchers, Garden and Willow Warblers were arriving exhausted from the North Sea, and landing anywhere they could find food and shelter.

     The following morning, one observer, David Pearson, walked along the coast south of Walberswick. Along a 3-km stretch, he logged a staggering total of 15,000 Redstarts, 8,000 Northern Wheatears, 3,000 Garden Warblers, 1,500 Whinchats, 1,500 Tree Pipits, and 1,000 Willow Warblers, along with smaller numbers of other migrants. Rarer migrants were seen in unprecedented numbers, too: Wrynecks and Bluethroats reached double figures in several places, with Icterine and Barred Warblers, Ortolan Buntings and Red-backed Shrikes also appearing.

     The species involved and the time of year, left the lucky observers in no doubt that they were witnessing a massive displacement of Scandinavian migrants which, heading south-south-west across the North Sea to the coasts of mainland Europe, had been diverted westwards to East Anglia by the adverse weather conditions.

British Birds (59, 353-376) in 1966 carried an article by Peter Davis, then Migration Research Officer at the British Trust for Ornithology, entitled, ‘The great immigration of early September 1963’. It describes what was being seen by observers and ringers along the east coast of the British Isles over the few days in early September together with the weather maps. During the last few weeks of August there had been cloud and rain over Scandinavia. On 2 September there was an anticyclone over Scandinavia, creating ideal conditions for the birds to leave in very large numbers; at the same time there was a vigorous depression moving from France into the North Sea, bringing a north-easterly to easterly wind together with heavy rain on the northern edge of the depression, towards the Suffolk and Norfolk coast during 3 September. The migrants were pushed westerly and arrived in the massive falls recorded during the period of heaviest rainfall.

The fall of migrants was described as by far the heaviest of its kind ever recorded in Britain.

What we did not know when we were at Benacre was that a bird ringer was at work there. Davis reports:

…at Benacre Pits, most of the birds appeared between 13.20 and 13.50 GMT, many thousands arriving along a half-mile front. Pied Flycatchers and Redstarts were the most abundant, but there were huge numbers of Wheatears, hundreds of Whinchats, Garden Warblers and Willow Warblers, smaller numbers of Spotted Flycatchers, Tree Pipits, Whitethroats and Robins, and at least 20 Wrynecks. Between the start of the arrival on the 3rd and early on the 5th (when he ran out of rings) A. G. Hurrell^† caught some 650 migrants there, of which half were Pied Flycatchers (a much higher proportion than was seen at other places); also included were 14 Wrynecks, two Bluethroats, three Icterine Warblers and an Ortolan Bunting. 

Benacre Pits was part of the area we explored (probably on the afternoon of the 5th; we have no record). I think the Bluethroats must have avoided his nets since we saw many tens of individuals.

I should point out that Benacre has changed markedly through coastal erosion over 50 years. We walked down the same path to the beach a few years ago and found the chunk of land containing the bushes and scrub where we had seen most of the migrants had gone. We could not remember there being the cliff line then and I have just read in a blog that there was no cliff line here at all until 1981 ‘rather a gradually descending warren which over the years has been subsumed to the sea’.

Also gone were the Suffolk Punches, surely the most attractive of the draught horses, that lived in a field to the right of the path*.

This map from a modern Google Earth view was where we walked; it lacks the land that has disappeared into the North Sea between the end of the path and the beach. The point of the arrow shows where we first noticed that the bushes were full of birds.

Having seen the result of that massive fall of migrants, completely by chance, we have turned birdwatchers green with envy over a period of 50 years.

†Later Sir Anthony Hurrell, noted amateur ornithologist and bird ringer; a civil servant in the Ministry of Education for a time he was later British Ambassador to Nepal (1983-86). He died on 19 April 2009, aged 82.

*Were these the ones reported to have been used as two teams for ploughing, harrowing and towing balers on the Benacre Estate up to 1995? There area number of references to Suffolk Punches with Benacre in the name in studbooks and pedigrees.

**By Bogomolov.PL (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Roger Akester (1922-2015) Avian Functional Anatomist

I was sad to see the death announced today in The Times of Roger Akester (Arthur Roger Akester), aged 92, on 29 August in Cambridge.

Roger Akester, veterinary anatomist at Cambridge from 1959 until 1991, will be remembered by all those with an interest in how birds work for his seminal contributions, made during the 1960s and obtained by x-ray and radio-opaque tracers, on the control of blood flow through the renal portal blood vessels and the passage of urine from the cloaca into the rectum and caeca by reverse peristalsis. The latter finding, which at the time was unexpected and contrary to the accepted view, provides the opportunity for modificaton of the salt and water content of the urine and for the uric acid to be metabolised by gut bacteria into useful products like volatile fatty acids; in other words, the recycling of waste products to get a second bite of the cherry.

The result of the mixing of urine, with its white uric acid, and faeces in the hind gut of birds is that both are voided together, as those who have been the target of a passing bird will testify. When I have to clean my car after an aerial assault by gulls that abound here, I cannot help thinking of both Erik Skadhauge, who went on the work on the salt and water aspects of modifying urine in the hind gut, and Roger Akester who discovered what was happening.

In the few hours since seeing the announcement in The Times, I have been able to find this radiograph (reproduced by W.J. Cliff in his book, Blood Vessels, Cambridge University Press, 1976), originally from Roger Akester's paper, on blood flow in the renal portal vessels and its control by the renal portal valves:

Bird Genomes, Bird Phylogeny—and Mesites

Science this week (12 December) carries a series of articles and eight papers on a major bird genome project. The  whole genomes of 48 species of have been sequenced by a very large and international group of authors. Using massive computing power they have obtained a new phylogenetic tree that completely destroys some traditional groupings while throwing up or confirming interesting relationships between modern species.

An example of the latter is the close relationship between the mesites—the very peculiar birds endemic to Madagascar—and the sandgrouse, the common ancestor of which, according to the results, split from the doves. In turn, the closest relations of this entire group (Columbimorphae) are  the flamingos and grebes (Phoenicopteromorphae).

Another confirmation of earlier findings on smaller parts of the genomes is that Birds-of-prey—the old Falconiformes—are blown asunder. That other strange bird, the hoatzin that is shown on the cover, emerges as most closely related to the plovers and cranes.

This is the summary of the phylogeny from the paper:

The origins of the work lie in trying to find the genes responsible for vocal learning in birds but the study so far, as I have just touched the surface of, has far wider implications for all that we know about birds. The radiation of modern birds, now grouped as the Neoaves, which occurred from nearly 70 until 50 million years ago, is really only now being revealed.

However, there is still some uncertainty, as might be expected from the number of species in which the genome has been sequenced; where the owls fit in is one example. The genomes of other species are apparently on the way to join the original findings in another round of number crunching.

I cannot resist moving from the general to the particular by showing a photograph—albeit a poor one—of a mesite. The mesites in their appearance and behaviour are some of the strangest birds I have seen; designed by a committee of civil servants doesn’t even start to describe the Brown Mesite (Mesitornis unicolor). We saw all three species in Madagascar in 2003. The commentary that accompanies the papers in Science describes the mesites as flightless. They are not flightless, they can fly but just do not often fly. They live, feed and nest within a hop of the ground. The Subdesert Mesite (Mesitornis benschi) only really flies when it feels threatened. Then it flies up onto the top of a low tree, puts its head down and tail up while fluffing out its breast feathers. For all the world it looks like a fruit. The photograph, a screen grab from a video, shows the bird just coming out of this position, slowly raising its head and lowering its tail before slipping to the ground. It only occurs in a small area of south-west Madagascar in spiny forest. The Moussa family were, and apparently still are, the expert guides in Ifaty. When we were there the forest was being cut back at an alarming rate so it is good to know that at least some of it remains.

Subdesert Mesite, Ifaty, 4 November 2003