Stuck inside with a cold currently and really missing my patch, so let's do October 2021
As I mentioned in the September post, autumn at my regular walk along the river can be a little quiet when it comes to birds, so I tend to venture out to the fields behind more often. The birds there increase during autumn, attracted to the fields where the farmer is turning the soil (not that I really know what's being done on the farm at any given time!), as the disturbed earth brings up invertebrates. It reminds me of a patch I had where I used to live which was all farm, it was frustratingly low in biodiversity at times but got a bit more interest from certain bird species in autumn. (This is all monoculture farming, and nothing like what farmland in this country would once have been like: I wrote a bit about that in the Knepp post here .) The birds I record in numbers are woodpigeon; black headed, herring and lesser black backed gulls; jackdaws and rooks, and the odd magpie, carrion crow, stock dove and feral pigeon alongside them. Pied wagtails and meadow pipits join the larger birds on the fields, and often feed alongside each other, while starlings line up on the telegraph wires and sometimes join the fray. I usually see a few linnets, stonechats and corn buntings on the margins too. It's hardly a wonderland of birds in either numbers or species diversity, but considering the climate of intensive agriculture we live in, I consider it a win. Especially the corn buntings, which have declined greatly in the UK and which my previous patch didn't have. I never saw them at all before I moved here.
There is one bird which I always feel incredibly lucky to see on my trips to the fields, as it's normally shy and can be elusive: the grey partridge. This is another bird that used to be very common in the UK and is now scarce due to changes in farming methods. In the pictures in field guides they look beautifully marked in orange, grey, russet and chocolate brown, but the name is more accurate to when you see them in real life- they appear as small, round, grey birds creeping over the fields. I first became aware that my patch had a covey of these lovely partridges in I believe 2020, and I was genuinely shocked- I thought for sure that if they were around, I would have seen them before. But that's the nature of these shy gamebirds. I'm lucky if I see them a couple of times a year.
On the 7th of the month, I had an incredibly good sighting of the partridges. There was a covey of five on the field alongside the usual flocks of corvids and gulls, and of the five a couple were smaller and were clearly youngsters from that year, so presumably grey partridges are breeding here too! The young birds were almost full sized but the male clearly hadn't calmed down yet from the breeding season and he was acting extremely territorially to other birds around. He puffed his feathers all the way up his neck and stood at his full height, showing off the large horseshoe marking on his belly, and ran around agitatedly. A couple of young rooks were feeding nearby, and he chased them off fiercely. They allowed themselves to be shooed away, but then when he wasn't looking they would creep closer again as if to annoy him. Corvids can be incredibly cheeky! I'd never seen anything like it, and never would have thought shy little grey partridges could be so confrontational!
Pheasants on the other hand, I sort of knew were quite territorial but hadn't witnessed it myself until I saw some having a fight on the 25th that month. Two males squared up, mimicking each other's movements, and then began leaping up at each other threateningly. (Interesting, another adult male was nearby but completely ignored them, and they it.) It was like a dance, but potentially more dangerous given that each bird has a sharp spur just above the back of its foot. If you ever see a dead pheasant hanging up at a market, it's a good opportunity to take a look at these spurs.
October is a transitional time. It's when I start to notice that the numbers of swallows and house martins are dropping, though some will linger into November. (The swifts are long gone.) The dragonflies are dwindling in October too- I recorded my last dragonfly on 12th October in 2021, which is relatively early for the last one, but I wasn't very good at dragonflies that year. By the end of the month the first of the winter redwings start to arrive, so you get a crossover of summer and winter species. My favourite autumn thing, though, isn't a summer or winter species but an irruption, the word for when unusually large numbers of a certain species of bird are seen around the country. Websites like Birdtrack keep updates on interesting trends like this and compare them to numbers for the previous year. Examples of irruptive species are waxwings and hawfinches (a particular impressive winter for hawfinches was 2017-2018). The much more common jay can also be an irruptive species and it's one of my favourites, and the only one I'm ever likely to see on my patch! Sadly a jay irruption didn't happen for me this autumn (2022), but in October '21 I started recording jays almost every day all of a sudden, when they are rarely seen on my patch at any other time of year. Best of all was on the 7th where I counted a maxima of 10 jays, flying one after the other! I think it was the first time I'd ever seen so many together.
The leaves are changing, and colder months are ahead. (As I write this, we just came out of a fierce cold snap in December 2022!) The numbers of blooming flowers are dropping off fast, but despite this I did add a few more to my flower sketchbook in October '21: black/green nightshade, common poppy, dove's foot cranesbill, and the beautiful orange dandelion known as fox and cubs. So called not just because of its colour, but because on each cluster of flowers one tends to bloom while the others are still buds at its base (the 'cubs' waiting behind the 'fox'.)
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