Dreadnought Geese

Canada geese seem to have a tendency to move from one place to another in single file.  Sometimes, when there are a lot of them, this can be quite an impressive sight.  When I see them moving over water like this they remind me of the British Grand Fleet sailing to the Battle of Jutland.  Earlier this year, I saw 50 or 60 of them moving like this down through the middle lake to the bottom lake in Reading University grounds.  Just this evening I saw 18 of them proceeding in single file down the Kennet, with a Greylag goose at their head.

Update on Sat 2005-08-13 by Tristram Brelstaff

This must have been the picture I was thinking of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Grand_Fleet_sails.jpg (It probably has nothing to do with the Battle of Jutland.)

A Pigeon takes to the Water

This evening I was watching some Canada geese on the Kennet in central Reading when something rather strange happened: a feral pigeon flew down and landed on the water amongst the geese.  I must have forgotten itself because the splash it caused seemed to surprise it and it immediately flew up again.  I suppose that it could have been picking up a piece of bread off the water but I didn't see any bread, and nobody was feeding the geese at the time.  I prefer to think that this bird just made a mistake and recovered just in time

Coots Building 'Second Nests'

Over the last week, I have on two occasions seen coots on the river Kennet building what appeared to be 'second nests'. 

The first time I saw this was when I saw one of the pair that had brought up two chicks on the nest near Highbridge Wharf started piling up strips of greenery under the boat traffic light just east of the Duke Street bridge.  The pair's two chicks seemed to be joining in, well one of them was standing on top of the pile.  At first I thought they had decided to move nest but after a day or so I saw that the new nest had disintegrated and they were back at their old nest again.

Then, this morning I saw that one of the coots from the nest at the mouth of Gunter's Brook was carefully draping strips of greenery over a log that had become fixed near the river bank.  It was placing the strips apparently quite deliberately, while its solitary chick looked on.

My first thought was this building of second nests could be the way that the parents teach their chicks how to build nests.  Another possibility is that these piles of greenery are food stores, however, this is less likely because there seems no reason to build them away from the main nest. 

Carrion Crow taking an Ant-Bath

Yesterday I noticed a carrion crow (Corvus corone corone) behaving rather strangely on the lawn at the front of our flats.  It was sitting down in the grass with its wings slightly extended sideways, as if it was sunning itself -- but the Sun was not shining.  I though it rather strange, but I had other things to do, so I soon forgot about it.

Well, today, what I presume was the same bird was doing exactly the same thing but in a slightly different spot.  Then a car slowly drove past and the crow stood up and ambled further away from the road, waiting until the car was gone before returning to precisely the same patch of grass to sit down again.  Then it occurred to me that I had often seen ants in the grass down there, so I went downstairs to take a closer look.  Sure enough there was a concentration of ants in precisely the place where the crow had been sitting.  Presumably, the crow was using these ants to de-louse itself. 
When I came back in, the crow went back to the same spot to resume its ant-bath.

Update on Wed 2005-06-08 by Tristram Brelstaff

After observing the crow taking an ant-bath I started to think about how such behaviour could have developed.  How on earth did the crow learn that sitting amongst ants was a good thing to do?  After all, sitting down in grass is not something that crows do very often as part of their daily life, so they are not likely to have stumbled across this behaviour by accident, and I would have thought that their first reaction on seeing ants would be to eat them, not sit on them. 

Yesterday I realised that the obvious place that crows could sit amongst ants would be in the crow's nest.  Ants might seek out birds nests as good sources of small parasitic insects and scraps of food and maybe the birds have learnt the benefits of the ants' presence, to the extent that when they see ants on the ground the idea occurs to them that it would be good to sit down among them.  If this theory is correct then it would imply that ants must climb all the way up to crows' nests which are normally located in the tops of tall trees.  Does any one know whether ants are commonly found in crows nests?

Update on Sat 2005-07-23 by Tristram Brelstaff

As I am typing this I can see a crow taking an 'ant bath' on the lawn at the back of our flats.  It has been there for the past 15 minutes at least.

Sparrows trying to be Swallows

With the warmer weather we are now getting quite a few flies over the lakes and rivers.  This week I noticed house sparrows hunting mayflies over the Kennet near Kings Point, something that I remember also seeing last summer.  They perch on the railings that run alongside the river, and when they see a suitable fly, they launch themselves out across the river, snapping at the fly, landing on the railings on the other side with it in their beak, if they are lucky.