Puffing Chests & Building Nests

So, you know, I'm not sure what's been in that. I think they might be jacked doors in it or pigeons and sometimes you get squirrels in it stuff.

“Like I said, it's been up there about five years. I've got another one which is further down the garden towards the pond.”

And that's exactly the same as that and that castrails in it. It's all years ago which were fantastic, you know, and they brought up the chicks and they're wanting them, bringing mice and stuff like that.

And it was just brilliant to think, you know, that you never imagined you'd get a castrail nest in a new garden, you know, and I've been little in this.

I'm sure I'm being, and this is get burning, collaboration with forest holidays. It's really exciting at the moment because there's this kind of, there's been this shift of energy in the air. You can almost taste it, where springs just on the coast of tipping over and with that you've seen a changing the bird behavior.

“So I've noticed in the last couple of weeks or so there's just that bit more on behind bird reactivity.”

In this episode, we're getting practical with nest boxes, sharing simple tips to help bird safely raise their little ones. For years they were overlooked, they were just seen as like a really average normal, you know, standard garden bird. And that wasn't until people started studying the sex life of the dune, and it turns out it's actually quite wild. We'll also be listening out for the UK's largest and most common pigeons. Wood pigeons, I find, are the awkward bird of the sea when it takes off.

“It's, you know, it's actually in a jumbo jet fight.”

That just has no control over itself. I'm sure there's only five thousand pigeons. You answered the call, stepped up, and wanted it, there's services in the national war effort. With spring just around the corner, now is the moment to get nest boxes ready. To explain what works best for the birds and why, here's one of our get-bearing experts.

My name's Katie Nethercote, I'm part of the wildlife inquiries team at the RSPV. Nest boxes are the whole are really good way of helping nature.

So unfortunately, with the loss of our woodlands, our hedgeros basically nest boxes are a way that we can substitute those areas where birds will have naturally nested.

So they replicate the cavity or the shelter, which they need to kind of raise, raise no young, so they're a great addition to kind of people's gardens. But you don't need a garden, you can also have a balcony. Obviously, it's hugely diverse, depending on species, not all species are the same requirements. It can really depend on what birds and what they need, whether that's the placement, some birds like to be within vegetation, so within my car, IV or climbing plants. And then other birds, you know, like to be really high, for example, swifts, as some are migrant, that we have here in the UK, and that's purely because they can't land like regular birds.

So the ability to perch, so the reason they have to do really high is because they have to get the angle and their speed up to the entrance of the nest box. A lot of birds are also sightloil, so if they know of a good place to nest and raise their young, they will come back to it year on year.

So it's a really nice way to give the birds basically a future and help kind of our populations as best we can, just by simply being neighbors.

I'm usually very, but people can certainly make their own, but we have guides on our website, people want to make their own, especially things like stuff boxes, they're really easy to make and place up on houses. Sort of that placement, some birds like Robins like to be quite low, they like to be kind of hidden away, whereas something like starlings, they like to have a clear entrance path. It's very, very little things in mind can really help different species, and we want to encourage more and more kind of wildlife friendly gardening, additional of nature ponds, because you know, it all started insects, you know, if there's insects and invertebrates, that will only create, you know, more of a success for our connects species, especially, you know, things like blue tits, people love to see blue tits doing well.

But ultimately they can't find enough food than that clutch, you know, may not survive at all, unfortunately we've had it in, you know, previous years where people have noticed their chicks have just suddenly died, and they don't know why, and often it's really hard to know, but by at least kind of us doing our best to provide that food will only mean that, you know, the chicks have the best chance, and it all starts with, like I say, insects and invertebrates and, you know, building up that ecosystem, even if we only have a balcony or you have a small garden.

“It all counts. Also, don't worry if your nest box isn't used. It's not a thing where if you put it up they're going to come immediately, like it can take a few years, you know, some people lucky and that they put a box up and immediately,”

you know, a bird is interested in that spring, but if they're not, like, don't worry, it can take a while, and it's all about creating the ecosystem around it, you know, we know people, we don't love to provide kind of spaces for nature, you know, but there are a lot of things you can do, like the placement of her species. Not putting kind of feeders next to nest boxes because ultimately you want to keep them separate, so you want to keep a few stalls away from the nest box, because that can just help add up birds, not feel like their nest boxes in mac and other birds territory, or little things like that, but also, yeah, don't be disheartened if it's not taken up immediately, nature will come, it just needs the space to do it.

Now, I'm ending the microphone over to a fellow spotter, to hear what's been happening on their batch.

It's a little tree creve, I'm not really tree. They live bird watching happening now, because it's guttling up the bark of a tree like a mouse, oh, I love them. Hello, I am Lucy Lackwing, I am a naturalist, I am a proud nature nerd, and welcome to my patch. This is a little rocky beach here on the island but I've got the sea behind me where I can do some birding, watching seabirds, and then all around me on the other side is a really nice stretch of wet woodland where I get all sorts of scrub and woodland birds species.

“So it's the perfect spot to go birding, where two habitats merge and collide.”

For me now, birding is just such a joyful, peaceful, grounding exercise.

It's not about seeing the rarest stuff or the most stuff or, you know, the snazziest stuff. I really enjoyed the humble kind of bread and butter of the bird in world. I really like watching the ordinary stuff, you encounter all the time, the black birds, the robins, the house sparrows, the wood pigeons. And just watching them go about their daily business, watching them be a bird, do their weird things, provision and nest, you know, forage. Watching how sparrows forage spiders on the outside of their house, brilliant.

And for me that's, it's in those moments where like, proper or and wonder lies, because you're not just having a brief encounter with a bird and right, and it down on a list, you're really immersing yourself in its world.

“That's how I like to go birding, and this is the perfect spot for it.”

I can sit here and watch birds out on the sea, shags, gannets, bread, breast of maganza, divers and all sorts. And then I can twizz around and in the woods I can watch all the standard stuff, a little flock of long-tailed tits just went through. There's tree creapers, there's some ravens that nest up on the hill. And in a few months the willow warms will be back, it'll be full of spring migrants. I'll be able to hear cookies hopefully as well.

It's really exciting at the moment, because there's this kind of, there's been this shift of energy in the air. You can almost taste it, where springs just on the cusp of tipping over. And with that you've seen a change in the bird behavior. So I've noticed in the last couple of weeks or so there's just that bit more umph behind birdy activity. Whether that's bird song, you know, I'm starting to see the songs of things like black birds and songs rushes ramp up.

And it's really funny and early springy can tell that they're not quite practiced yet. They've not quite got the hormonal oomph behind them, that has them in full swing, full volume and gusto of song. So I watched a song thrush just the other day that was starting to sing. And it was almost as if you've forgotten the words, it was kind of going like, "Oh, um, how does it go again?"

And then nest building behavior as well. So this week I saw my first house sparrow, a female house sparrow with a beak full of feathers.

Look like wood pigeon feathers, fluffy ones. And that tells me she's already started building a nest, so she's found a mate. And there's a little nukura crannies somewhere in the eaves near me. And there's a couple of copulating house sparrows that are getting ready to have a brood for the season, which is so exciting. So yeah, this time of year, if you ever see a bird with a load of material in its mouth, you know exactly what it's doing.

And obviously birds nest in different places as well. So things like house sparrows, perhaps starlings, a cavity nest as they nest in holes on buildings,

And then there's birds that nest, you know, traditionally the quintessential little nest built in the fork of a branch of a tree.

And then there's quite a few that are nesting early nesters that are nested in the undergrowth. So, you know, from kind of like chest hip height and below, in the Bramble and dry grasses and bracket and gorse and things like that. And so yeah, just this time of year, just casting your eye about you can see little bits of behavior everywhere. In fact, there's a robbing behind me that fly the farging for food or connecting material just off the beach in front of me. So just a bit more busyness in the air, which I really like.

Okay, I am retreating from the beach because it is getting so windy. I'm going to go and sit in my car and shelter a little bit from the wind. And there's just this really deep innate connection with bird life.

“And I think part of that is kind of being able to read their body language and behavior.”

You can really kind of tune into what's going on in new environment by learning to read birds as if they're a book or most.

In the same way that you can pick up on a really close one's body language or facial expressions and know what they might be thinking. It's started to be the same with birds, so I really think there's something really special about them as a group. Just because a they are so conspicuous and b they're just so fascinating and weird and relatable. I've got this, I've had, oh, I've got it, I've had this year's. Just covered it back to, well, in 1973, we've read this digest.

But now, you know, I would have been 14, but as you can see, it's all being patched up a bit and, you know, I'll wrap it up. But I love it because it's such a brilliant book. Just, you know, the drawings and everything, I just fantastic, you know, this particular artist, the draw, all these. And, you know, so you've got brilliant descriptions and yeah, but this and, you know, I'll just, well, I've been interested in bird watching for a long, long time before that. But this will like a special gift, a real, you know, a real eye-opener for me.

Because I wanted to identify the birds that were coming on our garden and stuff like that. And, you know, there's eight, seven seeds, you know, you had a lot, a lot of birds, but this book, yeah, it was a revelation to me. And, and I've had it ever since and I look at it and again, you know, and there's that many birds, you know, I mean, I just don't know. And, no, I've heard of it, it's like, like, brought a diver and read, brought a diver and smooth and pintail.

“You know, I guess you have to be near water to see them kind of birds.”

And it's just, kind of, live with me for, for all these years and then, can't do it at it really. I think that's one of the biggest things about being a bird is being able to look at kind of the size and shape of something. And going like, oh, you know, that's a pinch, that's a tear, whatever. And I think a lot of that comes down to, like I said, size, kind of shape of head, whether it's kind of sitting up or down, size of bill, shape of bill. You know, like, and I think being able to just kind of put all those little things together, which sounds complicated, but it's not, it's just kind of looking at things over and over.

Yeah, first. And that's when you get to the point where, say, you've got a crow and a rave and next to each other, and then theory that both big black birds, but you can look at that word and go, oh, it's got like a big chunky bell. So it's a rave and I think that does really come from just spending lots of time looking at things. Like a little kind of crow and white being connected.

“Yeah, like, you got all these different kind of, yeah, quite similar looking birds.”

Yeah, but you're talking to kind of a bird. And I'll be like, oh, of course it's that. How has, how has, you know, realised it has three, like three, you know, like that. Yeah, but it does all become a bit complicated.

Yeah, I've always found it difficult when, like, you've got wood, wood and read, woodless and willow, woodless.

And they're really, I'd tell it, perhaps, well, I have to say. No, no, no, they look like they are. Yeah, you're getting into, um, what's some bird, what's just called, like, Albee Jays or little brown jobs, where it's kind of, you're getting into that. Because of small brown birds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you've been sending in your birding questions, and Dr. Myero's Craig is here to help answer them. I've seen two pigeons doing a weird dance on my balcony. Lots of bowing and puffing out tests. Is it too early for them to be nesting? What are your thoughts on pigeons?

Yeah, right, aren't they? Yeah, you don't mind them, yeah. No, no, no, no. I don't mind. Doing the provide food for, you know, I spare a walk, so I spare a walk stick and dance, stuff like that, and all that on the species. But, um, I'm quite liking the sounds, the main thing. I think everybody likes that coin sound.

“I do. Yeah, I'm very fond of them. I guess you're right as well. That's why there are so many carigrants in the cities, because they've got lots of pigeons here.”

But, this is why there are so many pigeons everywhere, because unlike other birds, they don't really have a breeding season. They just, when they have a weather fence, we'll have another fruit.

Yeah, I've been there basically.

It means they can have multiple sets of eggs every year, which is why the numbers increase so quickly. So, pigeons having a bit of a flirt on your balcony, they probably are about to have another set of eggs. Now, things are going to start getting busy in the bird world, because for many species, this is when raw manses in the air. From around March through to September, birds across the UK are pairing up, setting up territories, and getting down to the serious business of breeding.

I've just been tired, it's really still a quiet atmosphere.

“There's a trio of red brethren who can't just just seem hungry.”

They've been both as a males, starting to do their fleeting coffee display. For many birds, courtship is all that being noticed. This morning, I could hear, rinsing in black birds, song thrush, robin, few donaks in the last week have been singing as well. And so, they make quite an easy, small, manageable, mouthful, to begin with, before the great big feast of birds on the rise throughout April and May. And of course, bird song means one thing. When it's ramping up at this time of year, it means it's a season of flirtation.

It's beginning birds are getting ready to flirt, to court, to mate, to lay a clutch of eggs, and to raise a brood, which is really exciting. I'm getting like stalked by this robin as well, which is good, which is exactly where I said it was going to nest. It's already got a little territory just there on the side of the beach, which is exciting. And I mentioned one particular bird that had started singing earlier, and that is the donut. The donut is a very small quintessential little brown job bird.

“Quite easy to overlook into myths if you have them, you know, in a garden or under bird feeders.”

They scoot around on the floor quite a lot. They're brown and grey, mottled. You could easily mistake them for a house sparrow. Indeed, they are known as hedge sparrows, even though they're not proper sparrows. And they're just funny little birds. And for years, they were overlooked. They were just seen as like a really average normal, you know. Standard garden bird. And that wasn't until people started studying the sex life of the donut.

And it turns out it's actually quite wild. So, donuts, depending on their local situation and depending on the territories that they've got knocking about, you can have situations where you have a typical monogamous pair, so a male and a female couple up, mate, producer, brood, raise it, happily ever after. You also have situations where a single male can have a couple of females, so he can mate with two different females or maybe more,

and raise a couple of different brews. And obviously that's quite hard work for him because it involves, first of all, a lot of mating.

Donuts can mate up to 100 times a day. Each time it's only lasting for like, a fraction of a second or a couple of seconds. So there's a lot of mating to do. And then there's a lot of parenting to do. If you've got two nests that you're provisioning, that's a lot of food, you've got a gather, that's a lot of beaks that you've got to kept fed. The other thing that happens with Donuts is you will get one female, he mates with two or more males, it can be several. And you can get to the point where a single female, Donut, has got a brood of chicks that has multiple fathers.

So she will find different males within her area, perhaps if she's on the edge of several territories. She'll mate with each of those males, perhaps hundreds of times, over the course of a few days as she builds a per clutch. And then those males will each look after that nest as if it's simply his own, he's the father of the entire brood. So she gets lots of extra help, she really benefits from this arrangement. Now, over the evolution of the Donut, the males have kind of cottoned onto this.

And so they've developed a strategy to try and prevent other males from mating with the female that they've managed to pair with. And that is where the concept of colloecal pecking comes in. Now, colloecal pecking is the pecking of the colloica. The colloica is an all purpose orifice on a bird. It's the place where they defecate from, it's the place where they, sort of female, they lay eggs from, it's the place where they mate from. So if one female has been mating with a male, donut, perhaps those hundreds of times in a day or whatever.

And she meets another male. If he suspects that she's already mating with a male, he can start colloecal pecking, basically pecking at her colloica.

And he'll do this for ages until it's basically swollen and pink. If you've ever seen this, it's really quite obscene to watch.

So she'll cast out the sperm from her previous matings.

And instead, then she'll mate with the new male, and hopefully he will become the father of her offspring. What he doesn't know is that she also mating with that male the day before and she'll probably do it again the day after. So she still benefits from this arrangement, but it's just really fascinating. Gross and weird and wonderful piece of behavior from the humble Donuk and its sex life, which I just find absolutely brilliant. I guess a big correlation between the birds and us and what I even learned when I hosted last season was that there's a big correlation with that preparation of the next generation.

The perigringing was one of the birds that we looked at and how much actually that does a lot of the work. In terms of going out and getting food and even sitting on the egg, for instance, and the things that I guess typically with moms in human form we look at as quotation marks female roles. In the bird kingdom, the male birds are doing more of that. Even to mate, the males are singing, they're the ones singing, trying to get the females attention, they're the ones dancing, you know, in other places in the world.

They're the ones trying to really get that first connection that bond and being able to mate with another bird.

“And I think it's really funny as well when we look at that because if we actually saw that in human form, can you imagine, as a woman walking down the road and all these men are like singing at you, like they are really love you.”

Let's go over there, you know, find a cozy place, have already got a nest kind of thing. That is what is happening in the bird kingdom. Citi girl in nature is a London-based content creator and young change maker. The birds teach us that responsibility isn't necessarily a male or female thing, you know, and we can take a lot from that, you know. It's a shared responsibility that takes into a reason a bird. She'll be popping up throughout this season from her batch in southeast London.

We see the pigeons all the time, especially in London, we see the pigeons all the time when we feed them, for instance, because I do that with my boys, even. I feed them seeds and stuff, and we see how they quickly they flock. They are sometimes seen as too brave with that of how they interact with us as humans.

“Pigeons were standing at a bus car, playing music, and the two pigeons, it probably was a couple because pigeons mate for life, their life is, you know, like they're locked in.”

So, you know, there are two pigeons that are standing and a bus car is singing, for like three or four songs, that's commitment. You know, like you don't see an average person standing around for a bus car for three or four songs. So if the pigeon is doing that, come on like, you go to give the pigeon some props. They're standing there, you know, that's probably like a date there, even because there's two of them. They're there, each other enjoying the music, and they're taking it in, and the thing is like,

they're even moving a lot out of the way of the humans and still staying in put, like that's an art form. How can a bird be so good at adapting to its environment and mimicking us?

“That it's even finding its own peace and enjoyment within the chaos, if you want to say.”

I'm really drawn to pigeons. Maybe because they're not appreciated the way that I thought it should be, and it's funny that it's not just me that feels that way. It's very progressive pigeons, you know, very progressive, you know, in terms of shared parenting. I like that aspect of it, I'm a new father, first I'm dad. I like the idea like male pigeons produce their own milk to feed their young, suppose female and male pigeons feed their young, this milk.

Which coincidentally is probably why we never see baby pigeons because this milk is like super protein rich, no carbs.

So these babies are just getting absolutely hench, you know, it's basically giving like protein power to basically essentially. So like you probably have more fast baby pigeon, but it's just absolutely stacked. So I find that just quite an amusing image. I'm too son Douglas, I'm a comedian and writer and pigeon enthusiast from Lewisham. More than any other bird, they face such hostility, you know, like spikes, netting, the doodot feed, sides like, no other kind of bird lists it's this proactive hostility.

They just get on with it, I think that's why I admire about them is like there's a real kind of like stoicism about pigeons, you know, there's an unfussy list about pigeons.

Every day on the streets, just getting on with it, not like Robbins, like Robbins, Robbins or like this country's national bird. And I just very much disagree with that decision, I don't know who made that decision. I don't think Robbins represented this country for one thing, they're just too cheery. No one else, so there's country's sighing, Mr Robbins, all right, okay, let take it down to couple doctors, okay, all right, I'm playing out there right now. We need the pigeon as our national bird.

We need a bird that we can relate to, we need the pigeon, because pigeons, you know, they've got the energy or someone who pops to the corner shop and they're dressing out. They're just like us, they're in the daily struggle.

You go back, you know, pigeons mentioned throughout the ages, you know, before telecommunications, it was pigeons, pigeons were the first posties.

They were the ones delivering our words to our loved ones and to people we worked with, in military communications, the Robbins used pigeons World War II.

“I think it's something like 175,000 pigeons served in World War II, 175,000.”

We had a national pigeon served, I have to repeat it again, there was a national pigeon service. There were 175,000 pigeons who answered the call, stepped up and wanted their services in the national war effort. The Nazis had the left whaffer, that was the most technological response air force at that time. And we sent pigeons, the pigeons who came back from the war with medals attached to little pigeon chess, because they made a positive contribution and they saved lives. My name was the one who introduced me to the wonderful world of pigeon watching.

I lived with my dad and she raised me, so we would feed the pigeons. She came to this country from the Caribbean, she's part of the Wind Rush generation, so I don't like lay on thick, but that migration, you know, in terms of pigeons, kind of, to find home. I found really interesting and how my dad, you know, people can see immigration is like, they've come from somewhere, but actually, you know, for her, she was coming to somewhere. And that somewhere was home, like, she'd found her home.

And part of that was like, she'd never seen a pigeon before. She'd never seen a bird that just walked amongst us, like, there were pedestrians.

This is crazy. She's like, from the Caribbean where they had all these, like, tropical birds, there was this bird here, that did something she'd never seen before.

“And in a way, I think, she kind of resonated with that.”

There were something like 15,000 people from the Caribbean served in World War II on behalf of the British, because they were part of the British colonies and stuff like that, and that kind of contribution. It isn't well known by everyone in the popular consciousness and stuff like that, and so, like, those kind of parallel experiences. I think it does make me feel a synergy with pigeons in that kind of respect. And I can't really envisage London without them. There's much problem. There's bread buses.

You'll often hear a wood pigeon before you see one. That sound. He's part of everyday life for a lot of us, including our resident birder and naturopy boxer Jason Sing. The sound of it. The rhythm of it. It is a sort of like, "I'm here. I'm just here." I've actually got a piece that I've composed, which the baseline is the rhythm of the wood pigeon.

That kind of thing I've had a baseline is made by wood pigeon.

I always feel like if I was to see it, it's almost kind of like a huge bamboo tube.

You know, and you get this kind of very hollow sound, you know, being sort of a breath through it. It's not so much that it's sung. It's kind of breathed with this sort of old tunnel shape inside its mouth. Because of the hollow tone, there is almost a kind of a sad whale within it, because also to make it, to try and mimic it.

“You have to take quite deep breaths, and it's not a smile. It is a melancholy.”

And I think in its simplicity, there's also a profoundness that if it was to go, I think it would leave a massive hole. This is looking for a sunset bird in winter by Robert Frost.

When chewing home across the white, I thought I saw a bird at light.

“In summer, when I passed this place, I had to stop and lift my face.”

A bird with an angelic gift was singing in its sweet and swift. No bird was singing in it now. A single leaf was on a bow. And that was all there was to see in going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill, I judged that such a crystal chill was only adding frost to snow

and guilt to gold that wouldn't sure.

“A brush had left a crooked stroke of what was either cloud or smoke.”

From north to south across the blue, a piercing little star was thrown. A brush had left a close eye.

A brush had left a close eye.

A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye.

A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye.

A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye.

A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye. A brush had left a close eye.