Although the woodpigeon is the bird I come across most often and the one I record the most, it is still one of my favourite birds, the species that made me a birdwatcher. I find them truly stunning and very resourceful, feeling at ease in gardens, parks and woodland alike. Despite their reputation as grain guzzlers their diet includes leaves, nuts (acorns and beech mast), buds, flowers and berries, including rowan, ivy, holly, cotoneaster and alder, which they often reach with great acrobatics. Although Woodpigeons have featured often in this blog, here I am compiling and documenting their calls and displays, especially those related to reproductive behaviour. Although in his article on woodpigeon behaviour Cramp says that 'they mark their ownership of a territory primarily by just being there' as indeed 'a Woodpigeon perched in a tree bare of leaves is a large and conspicuous object' Woodpigeons have a simple, but interesting behavioural repertoire.
Advertisement call. A deep, repeated 5 note phrase that serves as a territorial song. This is the well know Woodpigeon song, often heard early in the morning.
Display flight. This is another territorial display most frequent in February and March. The male flies around the territory rising in a broad arc, and then gliding down with wings held stiffly horizontal advertising ownership. They can do the rising and falling a few times before alighting. Although mainly a visual advertising display, as the bird does not call, sometimes the bird will make a clapping noise with its wings at the apex of the arc.
The Bow display. It is a courtship display that territorial males perform when still unpaired and trying to attract a mate and also when the pair bond is becoming cemented. The male approaches the female and with his neck enlarged he calls a three note call as he alternatively stretches up and then lowers its head, displaying the white and iridescent neck markings, and fanning the tail when it's at its highest. Check out this wonderful photo by Richard Hawley showing the display when fanning is at its maximum. Females can display some aggressiveness to the courting male, move away or flee if they are not interested. This display often happens on trees, roofs or aerials, but occasionally on the ground. When on the ground the male will try and get closer and follow the female hopping to bow just in front of her, one of the few occasions that woodpigeons will hop instead of walking.
Allopreening, billing and mating. Feeding the mate, gentle preening and billing precedes mating. I documented this behaviour in a series of photos here.
Slightly opened wings is a threat posture.
Fighting. Woodpigeons have large chest muscles, which power their explosive take off and fast flight. They have small bills and legs, so they also use their wings as offensive weapons in their territorial fights. Males will fly towards intruders landing in their territory and land adopting an aggressive stance, with neck stretched, flattened plumage and semi-open wings, and often this is enough to drive the intruder away. Occasionally, this develops into a fight, which sometimes occur in the depths of a tree. The pigeons will land near each other, alight their bodies and flap trying to hit each other (above).
Nest calling. This is a call by the male signalling to his partner a suitable nest site. I've covered this on other posts (here and here) and it is described in detail in the article by Cramp cited below. The call is harsh, and guttural composed of two notes, here is a recording of the call. I want to share here a video I took this morning, in which I got a good angle. You can see pecking or nodding movements to the nest floor in between calls:
More information
Cramp, S. Territorial and other Behaviour of the Woodpigeon. Bird Study5, 55–66 (1958). here.
Collared Doves have a extraordinary behaviour, their display flight. As males incubate during the day - between 10 am and 4 pm -, and females by night, males are most vocal and active advertising their territory in the early morning and in the evening. Males call their repeated three-note phrase from a prominent perch an aerial or a tree top in the vicinity of their nest. At the end of their call they pause and then launch themselves into a display of pure flight power: climbing almost vertically up to 10 m into the sky, and then gliding down in a broad, long spiral, with wings kept spread pointing downwards, and tail fanned, to finish in the same or nearby spot, sometimes calling a mute trumpet-like landing call. The wing flaps make a soft whistling noise. This sequence can be repeated several times in the early morning and evening. This morning I watched this male sitting on a church top calling, and managed to get the initial jump of the perch into his display flight.
You can watch a slow motion clip of the display flight by redjered here
In mid December I visited South Landing, at Flamborough Head. I was pleasantly surprised to find a pair of Fulmars displaying on a chalk cliff ledge, and, when I later mentioned this to a couple of local birdwatchers they replied, 'Yes, they are back', as if it was an expected event for them. This made me realise how little I knew about Fulmars. Back home I started reading about them. I also obtained a copy of 'The Fulmar' by James Fisher, which, aided by an injury that has left me temporarily house-bound, I've been reading and just finished today. This post is a compilation of facts on this fascinating bird.
1. The Fulmar is a superb glider of the open Northern ocean. They brave storms and rough weather when other sea birds might seek refuge in the coast. They use the wind to range over large distances, almost effortlessly. Their flight is quite different to gulls, with stiffer wings. Using the updrafts generated by cliffs, they often wheel tirelessly round and round their breeding sites in a characteristic aerial flight display.
2. The Fulmar is one of just three bird species recorded several times on or near the North Pole. The others being the Snow Bunting and the Black-Legged Kittiwake. In summer, they regularly patrol the Arctic pack ice in the Arctic Ocean pack in search of food. Watch this short clip of a Fulmar sighting near the North Pole.
3. The word fulmar appears first in written language in an Icelandic Saga written about 1200 AD. It has a Norse origin meaning 'foul gull', presumably referring to the oil that they spit out when alarmed and superficial resemblance to gulls. The inhabitants of St Kilda, who spoke Gaelic, also used the word fulmar, while the word was eventually lost in Iceland and replaced by the now used filingur. The fact that the same name was shared between Iceland and the Hebridean island is thought to originate from a time when commerce between Iceland and Scotland was well developed, possibly around the year 1000, in the time of the Vikings, who spoke Old Norse.
Fulmar pair displaying, South Landing 14/12/16.
4. Fulmars return every year to the same nest sites to meet their long-term parter, well ahead of the breeding season, often in December. They greet and bond with each other billing and head bobbing, with much loud cackling calls while keeping their bills open and throat distended. They visit their nest sites on the cliffs on calm days increasingly all through winter until the breeding season. Despite the long-term pair bonds, there is much 'visiting' of neighbours and extra-pair copulation both by males and the females. However, genetic studies show no extra-pair paternity. After mating, Fulmar return to sea before egg laying (the pre-laying 'exodus'), where they presumably store up on reserves for their long incubating period (up to six weeks). Unlike other birds, female fulmars store sperm and the last copulations might take place three weeks before egg laying. They lay a single egg in May, with no replacement if lost, on a bare cliff ledge, or a scrape or rabbit burrow on steep soil slopes. Both parents incubate for about of about six weeks, with changeovers every 4 days. Their superb gliding abilities allow them to range hundreds of miles from the nest site itself in search of food.
5. The oil spitting habit of the fulmar is the defence mechanism of the chick. Fulmar chicks are left on their own from about 2 weeks of age, when they no longer need brooding, while parents travel to get food. The rapidly fattening chick can by this time defend itself by oil spitting, something that ornithologists trying to ring them have repeatedly experienced. The apparently badly smelling oil, which is a stomach secretion, matts feathers and can cause the death of attackers (large gulls, skuas, falcons) by preventing adequate thermoregulation. The fully grown young, weighing at that time more than its parents (chicks over 1 kg in weight are not rare), eventually fledge in late August or early September and both adults and fledglings move into the ocean. The cliffs become then devoid of fulmars for a couple of months, until their return in the winter. 6. Fulmars are long lived. Adult mortality is low. The longevity record is almost 44 years old, but they are likely to regularly live longer. They mature slowly and breed for the first time at 6-12 years old. The young birds prospect potential nest sites, often ranging far from their natal sites, and may settle on the cliffs regularly for several years before actual breeding happens. Prospecting birds have been often seen hundreds of miles from the sea in inland crags and cliffs. There are some breeding colonies in quarries miles from the sea.
Northern Giant Petrel in South Georgia photographed by Liam Quinn, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.
7. The Northern Fulmar's closest relatives are the very similar Antarctic Fulmar and the Giant Petrels, awesome predators and scavengers from the Antarctic. There are two subspecies of the Northern Fulmar, Atlantic and Pacific which some recommend elevating to species status. More distant relatives are other 'tubenoses' like the Storm Petrels and Albatrosses.
8. There are a gradation of colour forms in the Fulmar. One of the extreme forms, the Blue fulmar, which is all slate grey, breeds in the High Arctic and is an occasional visitor of British coasts. The British and Icelandic Fulmar are of the light form, where the body, neck and head are pure white, and the wings and mantle grey.
9. In the last century the Fulmar has colonised large areas of the North Atlantic. Before 1878, when it first bred in Shetland, the only other breeding colonies were in the small archipelago of St Kilda, off the outer Hebrides (where it has been known to breed at least since much earlier than 1697), Iceland and High Arctic islands. Since then, it has undergone a astonishingly swift range expansion, most likely from an original north Icelandic population, and in the twentieth century colonised most of the cliffs around the UK, Norway, Denmark, and Northern France. The first English Fulmars in recorded history bred in the RSPB Bempton Cliffs nature reserve in 1922.
10. Fulmar feed on small fish, squid, crabs, pelagic molluscs and krill that they hunt from the water surface or in shallow dives, but they are also scavengers. They are rapidly attracted and will feed in numbers on dead, beached or floating whales, and used to come to whales being processed by whaling ships. They will also follow trawlers and feed on offal and fish discards. They will also feed on migrant birds, presumably after then fall into the sea exhausted. Their scavenging behaviour is most likely aided by their highly developed sense of smell. The fulmars use of whaling and trawling discards, a plentiful food resource was hypothesized by James Fisher to have spurred their range expansion - but recent diet analysis suggest that their reliance on these sources of food might be less than it was thought.
Bonus fact: The inhabitants of St Kilda relied to a large extent in fulmars. They used Fulmars, Gannets and other sea nesting birds for their feathers, eggs, skins, oil and meat. Even fulmar bones were used to fasten their jackets together. The young about to fledge were highly appreciated, and they were were collected the cliffs in mid August, just before they fledged, and when they were at their heaviest. The oil, which solidified when cold into a waxy substance, was collected from the young, poured into Gannet stomachs and stored in small stone buildings with turfed roofs called cletts. Whatever they couldn't use of the birds, they recycled, together with ashes and their own urine to fertilise their fields. Fowling wasn't restricted to St Kilda, it was a traditional way of life in Iceland, Greenland and the Faeroes, but it almost completely stopped when it was made illegal in the late 1930s after an outbreak of psittacosis that affected people processing the birds.
More information
Lockwood, W. B. (1954) Linguistic notes on Fulmar. British Birds47, 336-339.
Fisher, James (1952) The Fulmar. Collins New Naturalist series, London. 496 pp.
Phillips, R. A. et al. (1999) Diet of the northern fulmar Fulmarus glacialis: reliance on commercial fisheries? Mar. Biol.135, 159–170.
Kerr, K. C. R. & Dove, C. J. (2013) Delimiting shades of gray: phylogeography of the Northern Fulmar, Fulmarus glacialis. Ecol. Evol.3, 1915–1930.
van Meurs, R. & Splettstoesser, J. F. (2003) Farthest north polar bear (Ursus maritimus). Arctic56, 309.
Martin M. (1698) Voyage to St Kilda. London.
Hunter, F. M., Burke, T. & Watts, S. E. (1992) Frequent copulation as a method of paternity assurance in the northern fulmar. Anim. Behav.44, 149–156.
The lake in my local park is now divided up in two Moorhen territories. One pair has the island - now with a nest high in a willow well under construction, possibly already with eggs, the other has the opposite end of the pond, a more disturbed area which only has two patches of marginal vegetation near a path as potential nesting site. One of the island Moorhens climbed the willow tree with some nest material and passed it delicately to its partner sitting on the nest. Both males and females carry out nest building and are virtually indistinguishable by plumage, although males are a bit larger. After a while I saw the moorhen approaching some vegetable refuse that some passer by had dumped on the grass. The moorhen then spied either the other territory owner which was about 5 m away, or the coot that was standing nearby, and carried out the most wonderful display. With the bill quite low and the tail as high as she could keep it, it erected its white tail feathers, and half opened its wings, strutting while showing its bottom to the rival moorhen (which appeared quite indifferent). The view of the rival moorhen approaches the photo at the top. And the front and side views of the displaying moorhen are below.
You can watch a clip of the behaviour here.
You can also watch the moorhen strutting to a potential predator, a stoat, which I filmed recently here.
A trio of goldfinches came to the feeders today. One of them, while it waited on nearby branch to feed, carried out a curious 'dance', repeatedly swinging its body from one side to the other while it called. I looked into this and found out the dance it's got a name: 'pivoting display'. In a courtship context, the display is carried out by the male and he swivels towards and away the female as he swings. The wings are somewhat lowered - which makes the golden bars more visible - and the tail spread, showing the white patches. Female also pivots, and when both sexes carry out the display it may end in copulation.
The pivoting display is also used in aggressive contexts, and maybe the goldfinch was becoming impatient waiting by the feeder. I shall keep an eye on my visiting goldfinches and see if I can record this behaviour. I found a little video showing the behaviour in a charm of goldfinches. Check the individual at the bottom of the image from s 36.
And a great video of a pair of captive goldfinches courting.
There were three pairs of Goosanders in the park today and I spent some time watching them, as they were much more active than a few weeks back. The males displayed in front of the females, stretching their necks with their head feathers erect, and fast-forwarding on the water, at the same time making a string of water droplets that fell in front of the females (above). The females would stretch out of the water and flap their wings or lunge at other pairs.
Note how flat the top of the head of the male is compared to the top photo.
The Blackbird must be one of the birds I am most familiar with. Yet, I have only watched it courting once previously, and have never witnessed a copulation. Today I watched a male apparently subsinging inside a bush, but, upon approach, I realised it was an adult male adopting a strange, stretched-neck posture. I watched the bird and realised that there was a female low inside the bush. I couldn't include her in the photos, but I managed to get a few of the male. The one above is my favourite, there are a few more below.
This is David Snow's description of the blackbird's courtship display:
The fully developed courtship behaviour of the male is the blackbird's most striking display. The head, with the crown feathers partially erected and the beak open, is stretched forward; the neck-feathers are compressed, and the body feathers fluffed out, especially the feathers of the rump, which form a conspicuous hump; and the tail is fanned and depressed. The displying bird has a curiously wild, staring appearence.[...] The whole time, with his beak held open, he usually utters a low 'strangled' song, made up of chattering alarm notes, rough warbles and subdued snatches of what sounds like true song. If the display is performed in a tree, the male remains stationary or at most occasionally shifts to another perch near by, while the bowing part of the display is more prominent, developing into a rhythmic up and down movement of the whole head and neck.
This display takes its full form during pair formation, unpaired males - young males or widowers - court females most often in February-March. Paired females attack displaying males, unpaired females appeared indifferent, although they might later mate with the male.
A brief form of the display occurs just after females solicit copulation in the days prior egg laying. According to David Snow, copulation is always interfered with by other males, who jump at the copulating male, often knocking him off the female.
This is the first photo I managed of the blackbird singing
More information
Snow, D.W. 1958. A study of blackbirds. George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Woodpigeons come regularly to my bird table. These two arrived within a couple of minutes. I am not sure if they were a pair, but I doubt it, as they were not happy to be feeding so close. They alternated between feeding peacefully, and facing each other standing high on their tiptoes, chests up, measuring each other up. A bit of wing flapping occasionally - that is how woodpigeons fight, slapping each other with their powerful wings - but mostly just posturing. The photo was capture with my remote control camera.
Since the start of the year, specially on sunny days, I have had the chance of watching Sparrowhawks displaying. Surprisingly, it is the larger female who takes the lead in these open air flight manoeuvres. They fly high over their territory, flapping their wings in a slow, deliberate way as they climb up, only to dive down, stooping with wings folded back, and repeating the procedure again. Their partner can follow them in their flight path, but often only one individual is visible. This way they advertise ownership of their nesting territory in preparation for the breeding season, although aerial displays are also part of courtship.
This flying in the open behaviour is much unlike the skulking, darting hunting flights of this species, which often just offer a glimpse of the bird. It is when they are displaying that Sparrowhawks - being more visible - are likely to be spotted by Carrion Crows (below) and seagulls and have then to endure being mobbed.
There is a lot of Woodpigeon activity these days. I can hear the slow, five-syllable song continuously repeated from the aerials and trees in the street in the morning. The clapping of the territorial display, an exhibition flight, in which the Woodpigeon rises high noisily clapping its wings and then glides down in a circle with wings outstretched and kept horizontal. On a roof yesterday, a male and female were engaged in more active courtship. The pair makes these little jumps as they get closer to each other and they engaged in feeding, usually the male feeding the female.
This couple sat together for a while, but if courtship proceeds the male engages in a 'bowing display, with exaggerated, ritualised slow bowing until its beak touches the ground while lifting its tail and opening and closing it like a fan facing the female. The male calls at the same time. While singing the male ruffles his neck feathers showing off its side white and iridescent patches. If the female is ready she crouches opening its wings and the male quickly mounts her, otherwise, she will move away or try and peck the male or even fight him off with wing strokes.
The following YouTube video shows a male courting a reluctant female.
