SpringListen as migratory birds return to Dartmoor

As Spring takes hold at St Olaves, it is wonderful to hear a constant background bubble of bird song wherever we go in the garden. For months we had to be content with the plaintiff serenades of our robins and the haunting back and forth of Tawny owls during the long nights. But now there is song everywhere, and from so many different species. We are getting better at identifying birds from their calls and songs, but we still make good use of the free and very impressive Merlin Bird ID app from Cornell Labs. We didn’t know about the app this time last year so were unable to use it to help us identify the songs and calls of our returning migrants. Their presence in the hedgerows is one of the things that makes a Devon spring so joyful, but we still find telling them apart by call challenging without this extra help.

Of course, some birds need no app. We could hardly miss the Swallows swooping across the silage field outside our kitchen window, or the incessant, repetitive call of the Chiffchaff (always our first returning migrant). But this week, I have really appreciated how the app has helped me to tune in to the sweet if slightly rasping melody of the Blackcap, which seems to have returned to St Olaves in record numbers this year. Though I am yet to get a good view of one (they have always been buried deep in a bush or high in a tree), their song is unmistakable once this amazing bit of technology has helped you to isolate it from the background hum of our resident songbirds.

This afternoon I was lucky enough to be running the app when I heard an unusual high-pitched song while cleaning out the hens. When I checked my phone, the app had just registered the bird as a Firecrest; still rare in this part of Devon and the first time I have definitely heard it at St Olaves (last year only Merlin heard it). The Firecrest is closely related to the more common Goldcrest, and is slowly expanding its range in South-West England, having only become an established breeding species in the UK in 1962.

Firecrest (male), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED

But it’s not all about technology. Over breakfast this morning we saw a small orangey-red bird flitting about the garden. Fortunately, my binoculars were near to hand, and I was able to catch a good enough sight to confirm that this was a female Redstart rather than a Robin. Perhaps she had only just arrived after the long migration from Africa. A minute or two later she was gone, hopefully in search of a mate and suitable nesting sites.

Redstart female, Wikimdeia Commons, Andrew Thomas, UK, CC-BY-SA 2.0

We hope that over the next few weeks we will catch sight (and sound) of more of our rare and special migratory visitors, and that Merlin will continue to help us find them. The wooded valleys that run off Dartmoor, like our own Teign valley, are nationally important for species such Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Willow and Wood Warblers as well as the lovely redstart. We’ll let you know if Merlin helps us to confirm their presence, and with luck their successful nesting.

16 April 2024

Postscript: amazingly, later the same day, when taking a walk down to the river after supper, Merlin claimed to have heard a Willow Warbler on the hillside. Annoyingly I missed hearing it myself, and though we waited for some time, there was no repeat song or call (the Willow Warbler has a famously unusual, sweet, descending song). Maybe next time we will make a clearer ID – we’ll certainly try.

Bird App Wizardry: How Merlin helped us up our bird-spotting game

Bird App Wizardry: How Merlin helped us up our bird-spotting game

As we have long realised, St Olaves is an ideal location for some of the key target migratory bird species in west Devon: the Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Willow and Wood Warblers and Redstarts. Nestled in the upper Teign valley and with acres of unfarmed wood pasture and boggy areas it should be an ideal location for these species, and also for some of our rarer, and/or rapidly declining, resident species such as Willow Tit, Meadow Pipit and Skylark. We have seen Redstarts off and on over the past six years, but the rest have pretty much eluded us but for a fleeting sighting of a Pied Flycatcher in the Covid lockdown spring of 2020. All that changed a fortnight ago thanks to a friend introducing us to a bird recognition app developed through crowd-sourcing co-ordinated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The app is called Merlin Bird ID and is free to download for most smartphone OS. You can download bird files for many parts of the world, but these are large, so we stuck with the one for the British Isles and northern Europe. We have made most use of its Sound ID capabilities, having heard that its AI is particularly effective at recognising bird songs and calls in the wild. It was an immediate revelation. Because the app lights up whenever a particular bird is calling, within a day or two we had both learnt or relearnt the calls of a whole host of birds, some of which, such as the Goldcrest, Siskin and Stock Dove, we realised were around us all the time. We also became more confident about identifying other species, finding it easier to pick out the sweet sound of the Blackcap against the backdrop of general birdsong. Its educational value alone is extraordinary.

The short Merlin Bird ID app video on YouTube

But Merlin also quickly identified a group of birds that we had never recorded at St Olaves, including the tiny, orange-crowned Firecrest, Skylark, Meadow Pipit, Willow Warbler and Spotted Flycatcher. At first, we were sceptical. Was the AI playing tricks and misinterpreting more common bird calls? But then it flashed ‘Spotted Flycatcher’ just as we saw a small bird dart off a branch, loop in the air and return to the same spot. Bingo. In the week that followed we saw Spotted Flycatchers all around the viewpoint area, including one in a nest box (now confirmed as a lined nest). This morning, I watched two Flycatchers together on a branch close to the nest, until a third landed beside them only to be quickly chased away. Suddenly, we seem to have flycatchers everywhere (and a neighbour says they have also seen Pied Flycatchers nearer the river). Obviously, Merlin hasn’t brought the birds to St Olaves. We hope that that’s down to us trying to manage the land better for diversity, including creating more abundant insect life. But it did alert us to their presence and help us learn what birdwatchers call their ‘jizz’ (or giss): their distinctive movements, behaviour and overall appearance. Flycatchers, we now know, display a lot of jizz.

Spotted Flycatcher being ringed, Northants 2013 [cc-by-2.0]

So give Merlin a try. It’s not perfect – Cornell Lab is clear that they still want to build their underlying crowd-sourced database (we’ve noticed that it’s particularly patchy for UK birds of prey—no Goshawk, Merlin, or eagles, only the common Buzzard etc.--it also wrongly thinks Tawny Owls are rare at St Olaves, when we see or hear them most days). But it will only get better, and it’s already an amazing free app that has transformed our appreciation of living in this beautiful spot.

St Olaves,

June 2023

Saint Olaves' Owls

Laura Sangha (guest blogpost)

Baby Tawny owl underneath one of the Giant Redwoods

Let’s be honest. When Jane and Jon asked if we might like to do some house sitting for them this summer we absolutely leapt at the chance. Since moving to Devon twelve years ago we’ve had endless fun exploring its huge variety of habitats, from its rolling hills and history-rich towns, its two coastlines with their craggy shores and red sandstone cliffs, its piney plantations, its muddy estuaries, harbours and havens, and its stony and sandy beaches. Perhaps most of all, like so many before us, we have felt the inexorable pull of Dartmoor and have spent many happy (and some rather soggy) hours pottering under its huge skies, stomping up towering tors, taking photos of beech trees growing out of stone walls and dipping in its (mostly icy) rivers. So what better than a couple of nights on the edge of the moor, immersing ourselves in the sights and sounds and smells of this stunning landscape, from the comfort of beautiful St Olaves House?

And St Olaves was kind to us indeed. We spent hours watching birds around and on the feeders (house sparrows, great and blue tits, siskin, chaffinch, jackdaws, blackbirds, magpies, pigeons, nuthatch and even a greater spotted woodpecker muscled its way in). We wandered endlessly and marvelled at our luck to be there for two days of beautiful sunshine, showing everything at its very best. The gardens and grounds are a riot of dayglo spring greens, flowers are bursting out everywhere, the birds are in a frenzy while the somnolent buzz of insects accompanies you wherever you go. We made friends with the chickens by giving them sunflower seeds and peeked at the quails, discovering that they are expert egg hiders. We took a wander down the river and braved the stepping stones (not so brave, the river was very low), and I woke in the night to spy bright bright stars glinting in the skylight over my head.

Tawny owl in the trees at St Olaves

As if that wasn’t enough, St Olaves had one final treat in store for us too. For as we wandered up from the orchard garden early in the afternoon, I spotted an out of place indistinct grey shape on the branches at the base of a giant redwood (giant redwood!) a little away from us. Taking out my camera I was able to confirm with the zoom that it was what I suspected – a tawny owlet! It was initially facing away, but it caught wind of us and turned to pin us with two shiny black orbs – quite an unnerving sight amidst all the fluffy grey mess of its young and underdeveloped feathers.

We kept our distance and left it alone, but it played on our minds as it was quite exposed to predators, close to the ground and not showing signs that it was able to fly well, if at all. Given the wonderful weather we decided to sleep out at the shepherd’s hut that evening, which was not far from where the owlet was perched, so we knew that it hadn’t moved at all in the afternoon. However, at dusk we realised it had disappeared, which we took to be an encouraging sign as we hadn’t heard any obvious sounds of distress. Soon after that we spotted the tell-tale shapes of large birds swooping in the trees around us, suggesting the owls were on the move, and when I popped to use the compost loo I could actually hear a bird in an oak tree nearby, calling, presumably for a parent. After standing still for a while I was able to make out the distinct silhouette of our little fluffy friend in the tree, and just as I did, I saw the parent fly in and feed the young one. Leaving them to it, we heard the owlet calling most of the night, and in the morning I took particular care to scan the trees nearby and was yet again rewarded with the sight of one of these magnificent and mysterious birds, this time an older one taking a very well earned rest.

Kingfisher rescue

Amazingly, this morning Ian Crawford, who helps us with the garden, came across a fledgling kingfisher far from the river and calling plaintively in the undergrowth of the Shrubbery. At first he let it be, but as the calls continued and with no sign of its parents, eventually he felt obliged to intervene.

The kingfisher skulking in the Shrubbery undergrowth

Kingfisher in hand

Kingfisher about to take flight by the riverside

With utmost care he scooped up the fledgling bird and carried it down to the edge of the River Teign some 400 metres distant (a descent of about 40 metres). At first the little bird sat stunned where it had been placed, but in minutes it was flying off down-stream. We can only hope that it will quickly learn to fend for itself and perhaps even set up home nearby (but given fledgling mortality is known to be very high for kingfishers it is perhaps enough to know that these beautiful birds are successfully breeding on our stretch of the river).