Roy's blog

Earlier this year, I started cataloguing over 60 years’ worth of field notebooks, diaries, lectures, papers and reports in the hope of writing books. Its time-consuming work, made more so by the number of fascinating letters and wildlife records which draw me back over the years. I’m surprised how often wildcat comes up although it seems I saw as many hanging dead from fences as I saw alive. In the 1960’s and 1970’s they were pretty widespread, whereas the other mid-sized carnivores were surprisingly scarce. Between 1960 and 1963, working as a full-time field ornithologist in the Scottish Highlands I failed to see a single pine marten despite actively searching for them. Badgers and otters were scarce, and I well remember an old crofter telling me that a fox he’d killed in 1952 was the first seen on the Black Isle for nearly a century.

I’m a great believer in history as an important part of successful wildlife management and essential to ecological restoration, nowadays called rewilding. It’s clear now that hybridisation with domestic cat has been at the root of the recent decline of the wildcat, but what of the other problems. My diaries don’t tell me, but I think I remember that the wildcats I saw, 50 years ago, whether alive or dead, all looked like wildcats rather than hybrids. Could it be that when wildcats were common, there was far less chance of them breeding with feral cats? Or catching diseases from them?

Clearly, in those days, killing by trap, snare, poison or gun reduced the numbers of mammals but that persecution seemed somehow to have a greater impact on the other middle-guild predatory mammals than on wildcats. May be because the others had more easily found resting and breeding dens. This almost certainly changed later in the century, when spotlights became an effective way of shooting predators at night, leading to the killing of more wildcats. Nowadays badger, pine marten, otter and fox (in some areas) are probably commoner than they have ever been in northern Scotland, yet wildcat is in serious decline. Could there be a link? Could the high numbers of its competitors put the wildcat at a disadvantage? I have a sneaking suspicion that it could.

With that thought, I believe it’s necessary to look at the bigger picture, not to concentrate solely on individual species but to think of those species’ place in larger ecosystems. We need to recognise that successful restoration of iconic species may be very difficult unless we think and act in a more holistic way. This brings me to the debate about lynx.

When I hear people say that we cannot bring back the lynx for fear of putting paid to the wildcat, I wonder if they really understand the functioning of ecosystems for wildlife conservation. I remember one winter riding through deep snow in a Carpathian forest and coming across a wildcat eating the remains of a roe deer under a hazel tree. I had earlier followed the footprints of a lynx along a forest track for maybe 2 km. My hosts, experts on large carnivores, knew exactly where I had seen the wildcat because they had seen it with its kill in the snow several days earlier. To them, lynx and wildcat were both simply part of the wildlife community in the mountains of Romania.

The return of the lynx to Scotland truly is an essential part of restoring nature to our country and re-establishing a functioning ecosystem to show the real benefits of rewilding. Instead of posing a threat to wildcat, the impact of lynx on fox and badger would undoubtedly, in my view, benefit the wildcat by reducing the numbers and ranging behaviour of its competitors. In the very long term, true recovery of wildcat may not be possible without restoring the lynx. Time to get on with it?

Over the last week Britain’s first ever recorded bearded vulture (lammergeier) was seen in Gwent and then on Dartmoor. It seems likely it was the young vulture seen in Belgium on 9th May and thought to be a wild bird from the mainland European population, which is increasing. It must have had a shock in our country because its natural food is large dead mammals and our farm regulations now insist on all dead livestock being cleaned up from the countryside. A bit like us going to the supermarket and finding all the shelves empty. The bearded vulture is the last species in the chain of vultures which eat and clean up large animal carcasses. After the griffons and black vultures have feasted on the carrion, the bearded vulture is the ultimate scavenger by breaking the large bones and eating the marrow. Nowadays in our sanitised countryside there’s not much opportunity for bearded vultures, nor burying beetles or bone fungi.

In fact the removal of calcium, in the form of bones, from the countryside is a major change in the last hundred years. This is particularly problematic in the uplands where calcium is scarce, and the annual loss in the form of sheep and cattle bones is massive, as stock go to market. It must be thousands of tons per year, and nowadays even the bones of most red deer are carried off the hills. But is this loss of calcium a problem for the ecosystem? I learnt recently that a scientist had shown that the eggs of the ring ouzel, the mountain blackbird, had become thinner and thus more vulnerable, probably because of acid rain causing losses of calcium in the uplands. I’m not suggesting female ring ouzels could eat bones, before laying their eggs, but there’s no doubt that any bone or deer antler left in the countryside is quickly gnawed by creatures seeking calcium.   It’s all part of the web of life in which we live.

My personal view is that no calcium should be removed from nature reserves and protected areas, so that the carcasses of culled deer are left in situ. This would be a major contribution to carrion eaters whether invertebrates, birds or mammals, and then for fertilising plants or hosting fungi. This may run counter to our fixation on health and cleanliness, and I’m also told by my reserve manager friends that it would cause a problem by increasing the numbers of foxes and badgers. But that leads on to another issue about large functioning ecosystems, where high numbers of middle-guild predators require control from the return of lynx and wolf. It’s interesting where thinking about a lost bearded vulture takes us – I just hope it finds a big dead animal in Dartmoor National Park. Or for goodness someone put out a couple dead horses! You never know it could become the first step in vulture recolonisation of Britain.

Earlier this month, I had a phone call from a friend telling me that an osprey nest on his land, which had not been used for nearly a decade, was being rebuilt by a pair of ospreys. A few days later, we were amazed to identify, with our scopes, that the female was in fact the 25-year-old named Green J. I had ringed her as a chick in Easter Ross in 1991, and she had bred at a nest near Carrbridge in Strathspey since 1995. She was a good breeder producing many young, some of which were translocated to Rutland Water and later to Andalusia and most recently to the Basque country. She was the very first osprey in the UK to be fitted with  asatellite transmitter. That was in 1999 and we learned that she wintered at a reservoir in central Spain and did not go to Africa. The transmitter was removed after a few years but in 2013 we satellite tracked her and her mate blue XD, and after all these years she was still returning to the Gabriel y Galan Reservoir in Extremadura. Last summer, Green J was suddenly kicked out of her nest by a large young female osprey and she also lost her mate. We tracked her wandering up the River Spey and then lost contact and were worried that she might have died. But we were wrong because the Spanish ornithologist, Javier Prieta, was sure he saw her at her favourite reservoir this past winter. Clearly he was correct because she returned again to Strathspey and yesterday when we monitored the nest we could see that she was incubating eggs. She was with a new mate and we hope they have a successful summer. I also checked her old nest where last year’s intruder had also found a new mate, because blue XD died in Senegal last winter, and it looked as though she was just ready to lay eggs for the first time. Yesterday we also visited Red 8T, a very well-known male osprey to the bird photographers who regularly visit the Aviemore fisheries; he was circling with an intruding male Osprey close to his usual nest, while his regular mate was incubating eggs. Near my home in Moray, the old female Morven has also returned for another year and has mated to the same male as last year and is incubating eggs in the same nest. Last year she had two late young which were below weight when we went to ring them. One of them I collected under licence for the Swiss Osprey reintroduction project while the other rapidly thrived on his own and was successfully reared. I’ve followed the fortunes of these ospreys for well over 50 years, watching individuals start breeding and disappear, some lasting just one year or a few seasons while others continue on into old age like the veteran Green J breeding at 25 years. It’s funny really because it should teach me that I should accept that I’m also getting old and can’t climb trees like I used to when there were just a few pairs breeding in Scotland. Oh well, I can’t climb the bigger trees any more but I can enjoy beautiful sunny days like yesterday in the company of ospreys.

This evening, in memory of an old friend, I pulled out an old red Ordnance Survey map – number 9 – which Bernard Hendy sent me, long ago, with all his peregrine nests marked on it – a total of 15 sites with breeding pairs in one summer.I learnt this week that Bernard had recently died during a visit to Zambia. I first met him in the 1970s when I was Highland Officer of the RSPB. It was a time when we spent huge effort protecting peregrine falcons from egg and chick thieves. It was not long after the pesticide era had decimated the bird through the UK but numbers were still good in the Highlands. Unlike today, the north-west corner of Sutherland had high numbers of breeding peregrines and these birds brought me into contact with Bernard. He had moved to the Balnakeil craft village as a candle maker. He had a great love of falcons, in fact, his son was called Merlin. I really enjoyed spending time with him in the Durness area and remember vividly one time when he phoned in great excitement to tell me he had found two nests well under a mile apart south of Rhiconich. A few days later I was with him – we looked at the pair on a cliff above the loch – they had young – and then hiked across the other side of the road. There was the second pair. It was a high point for peregrines in the north-west corner of Scotland and we were lucky to have such an enthusiast living there and keeping an eye on them each summer. Bernard left Scotland and we lost contact until a few years ago when he returned with his wife Irene to live at Durness. Immediately there was that old friendship again and I learnt of his great interest in the conservation of tigers in India. My sincere condolences, of course, go to Irene and his family.

Early morning check of my emails gave me three lots of data from Cromarty’s transmitter. I was really disappointed when the transmitter stopped working on 14th March and I wondered whether he had been lost over the Sahara desert on migration. But I was wrong and it seems that either the transmitter went on the blink or the local mobile phone mast has been out of action for a month. Anyway today’s data showed that Cromarty was still living at the same wintering site in southern Senegal and each day 5th to 10th of April he had flown out to fish in the Atlantic Ocean. It is really fantastic that the transmitter is working again, and fingers crossed that it continues to do so, because then we should be able to track his return migration to Scotland. This bird is coming up to 3 years old so should be looking this summer for a nest site and mate. It’s about time that he started his northwards migration so I’ll be checking regularly to see when that happens. On Saturday I checked his favourite roosting area near Aviemore where he spent time last August, but there was nothing on the most likely roost tree. Not surprising as he was still in Africa after all. It’s a reminder that when satellite transmitters fail it doesn’t necessarily mean that the bird has died.

I’ve had a great few days monitoring the osprey nests in my study area and just over half of the birds back at their nests. For once there have been no nests needing rebuilding after the winter – no severe wind damage this time.  I always enjoy finding old regulars back at their nest sites and many of them were there. The male Osprey Red 8T was back at his nest with his regular female, and on the previous morning I watched the female named Morven perched beside her nest with her last year’s mate. Both of those transmitters are old and no longer work. I was looking at the weather forecast last night and it didn’t look very good for the Bay of Biscay, with a nasty low pressure giving strong easterly winds likely to blow a lost migrating ospreys well out into the Atlantic Ocean. Definitely weather conditions to hug the French coast and then there will be a battle against northerly winds through the United Kingdom. Oh well that’s what’s living in nature means. Survival of the fittest and the luckiest.

I was getting very worried about Beatrice as no signals had been received since 13^th March. The weather was still very wet in Northern Spain and she would have found fishing very difficult in the turbulent rivers. This morning my worries were confirmed by an email from my Basque friend, Aitor Galarza of the Urdaibai Osprey Reintroduction Project telling me that Beatrice had been found dead.

This afternoon Aitor emailed again with the following message

“Hi Roy

The body was found yesterday by a birdwatcher (Carlos Area) on the banks of the Urumea river close to Hernani (UTM 586604, 4785491) and passed to the gamekeepers of the area. I have just talked with the head of the forest guards and he has told me that the bird was without the head and looked extremely weak. They did a x-ray in order to rule out that it had been shot. He thinks it died because of weakness and later the head was eaten by an small carnivore. He will send the transmitter and the rings to the Aranzadi Society of Sciences in San Sebastián. From there they can send you the transmitter by mail or I can take it with me when going to Scotland this summer. Attached some pictures by Carlos Area.

Best wishes,

Aitor”

Beatrice found dead by river

What a great pity. I thought something might go wrong when she abandoned her normal stop-over location on the River Adour because her favourite fishing areas were no good because of heavy rain. She tried to find alternative fishing sites including going to two small estuaries in North Spain but again fishing was no good – cold water and floods. Turning into the mountains to find the smaller rivers was unfortunately unsuccessful and she starved to death.

Beatrice was an old experienced osprey coming into her 16^th year but it shows that even old experienced ospreys make mistakes. She should not have left her wintering site in southern Spain so early and then she could have missed the worst of wet weather. Running into very wet weather in north Spain and south-west France is a hazard for UK breeding ospreys returning north in spring. Remember the old female Logie which got stuck for two weeks in 2008 in Urdaibai estuary and the young osprey, Fearna, died in Rioja region in bad weather in May 2013.

Beatrice was ringed as a chick in Strathdon, Aberdeenshire on 8th July 2000 by Ian Francis and Stuart Rae, and was one of three chicks. She arrived at nest B16 near Forres in Moray in 2003 and was joined later in the summer by a male. She then bred successfully for 12 summers, 11 times at this nest while in 2010 she bred at an old nest K02 in East Moray. She raised a total of 24 young in her life time – 8 broods of two young, two broods of three and two broods of one young. She paired with three different male ospreys.

I caught her in July 2008 and fitted a GPS transmitter which gave us amazing data into the eighth year. Beatrice was a slightly unusual osprey in that she did not migrate all the way to Africa, but wintered in southern Spain, an area which is only a stop-off point for most Scottish ospreys.  On her migrations she had a favourite stop-over location on the River Adour in south-west France. Beatrice became a firm favourite to many people, especially my Scottish friends who could watch the nest from their house, and the local people who searched for and found Beatrice at the River Adour and the River Guadiaro in Spain. On one occasion she also visited Rutland Water.  We will all miss her. I hope a new female will take her place at nest B16 and I hope that bird may look forward to as long and as successful life as Beatrice’s.

Beatrice at Eyebrook 2008

Last month I had a most interesting week in Sichuan learning about giant pandas, thanks to Iain Valentine, Director of the Giant Panda Project at Edinburgh. Iain’s colleagues in the China Conservation & Research Group on Giant Pandas (CCRGGP) showed us their work and took us into some amazing places.  This was my first visit to China so everything was new and exciting and different – Chengdu city has a population of 18 million, a far cry from my home town of Forres in Moray. I visited three of the panda breeding centres but Wolong, in its impressive valley in the mountains of Sichuan, was the high point of my visit.

Here we saw the old Wolong base, much damaged by the 2008 earthquake, and the new panda HQ, which is a most impressive place built with funds from Hong Kong – its state of the art tastefully built with local stone and landscaped with trees and bamboos. There were already 8 groups of enclosures capable of holding 30 breeding females, as well as maternity units, laboratories, offices and a most impressive education centre. On two days we hiked to field stations in remote valleys, where teams of field staff carry out field work and have built large electric-fenced enclosures as training sites for the gradual release of captive bred pandas. It was great to see the teams in the field – including graduates and professors dedicated to field conservation, with an ethos based on large ecosystems.

The Wolong Nature reserve itself is 200,000 hectares, while the larger Sichuan panda ecosystem is twice the size of the Cairngorms National Park at nearly a million hectares. It contains 7 giant panda reserves as well as other protected sites and the aim is to improve connectivity throughout the whole ecosystem. The giant pandas are the flagship species but these mountains rising from 1200 to 6250 metres are a biodiversity hotspot: 5-6000 species of plants including magnolias, rhododendrons and bamboos, many of them endemic, making it the richest of any temperate region. 109 mammal species including clouded and snow leopards, golden cat, golden
monkey, red panda, takin and white-lipped deer, and over 365 species of birds, 300 of them breeding including Tibetan-eared and white-eared pheasants.

There’s more panda ecosystem in the next provinces to the north and the latest estimate of giant pandas in the wild is 1864, based on field signs and DNA. 66% of them live in panda reserves belonging to the State Forestry of China.  The aim is to restore damaged parts of the forest range and increase their numbers; even now with the lower total and the size of the available habitat the population looks to be long term secure. Looking out over this incredible range of mountains with their jagged snowy peaks and deep valleys of native forests and bamboos I could see the importance of giant pandas. An icon of conservation in China (and worldwide) which forges an incredibly strong worldwide partnership, led by China, to conserve this special bear and its incredible ecosystem.

As ever when abroad, this time sitting on a rocky hillside in the backyard of the giant panda, I thought of nature conservation back home and it’s very worrying. It’s embarrassing to have to tell foreign colleagues that 99% of our native forests have gone. We have to do better and stop kidding ourselves that we are conservation leaders in the world. We must fast track the restoration and conservation of large ecosystems to secure our nature, and our future. For me that means that ecosystem conservation should take precedence over economic activity in some 40% of our land and seas. Pro-active work in the field must be aided by sound research not held back. We need to be more entrepreneurial for nature, always aim high, recognise the importance of icons and remember to say ‘when’ not ‘if’. For example, on the world stage, it would be a shocking failure if the lynx were not restored to Scotland by 2020.

Very best wishes to you all for 2016

Last week we were in the south for a wedding near Rutland Water and to see family in Hampshire and Buckinghamshire.  Driving on motorways or back roads, we saw red kites as the most common raptor in the skies. The first of them showed up in the grey autumn skies as we headed for my son Roddy’s home in Amersham, with more on the way to Hampshire and north to Stamford. One morning we walked into Old Amersham through lovely beechwoods, kites overhead – even one patrolling the road where my son lives.

That’s what I like about kites: they are so easy to see and identify, and they respond so well to human contact. I find it marvellous that people can now feed red kites in their back gardens. The remains of a chicken leg here or an old sausage there make a welcome meal for this ultimate scavenger. I’m generally not keen on feeding birds and have always felt uneasy about the huge amounts of non-native food such as peanuts which are fed to birds in Britain. I’m not sure it’s in the long-term interest and I also think it obscures the appalling declines of common birds due to intensive agriculture, chemicals and modern life. But feeding red kites is different – they have fed beside humans right back to our earliest ancestors and to the Neanderthals, swooping down for morsels at campsites or after hunts of large mammals. It’s lovely to think they would once have fed on scraps of mammoth or woolly rhino being cut up by humans in ancient Britain. Nowadays there is such a rush to clean up dead animals in the countryside that the supply of carrion is really limited for birds like kites – we are, alas, too tidy and the ecosystem functions break down.

Whenever a kite floated over, I took quiet pride in the fact that 25 years ago, no kites bred in England or Scotland, and that I was fortunate to be one of the RSPB & Nature Conservancy team that restored the red kite. In 1989, after a good few years of opposition and delay, I flew to southern Sweden on the very first kite-collecting trip. Ornithological friends in Lund were so helpful to me and within a few days I had collected 12 young red kites to start what has become an incredibly successful project.  Magnus Sylven drove me over the bridge from Sweden to Denmark and onwards to a military base, where a RAF Nimrod patrol aircraft from Kinloss swooped in to take me back to northern Scotland with my precious cargo. Eight of the young kites were reared and released at a friend’s farm near our RSPB office near Inverness and the other four travelled south overnight to the Chilterns release area.

This was the start of one of the most successful ever reintroduction projects, with red kites now breeding from northern Scotland down through many parts of the UK to the south of England. That’s why I feel quiet pride whenever I see this distinctive-shaped raptor circling town and countryside. How I wish that we could get on and have golden eagles and sea eagles over such a big range. It’s perfectly easy to do ecologically but in the UK, social and political issues too often hamper bold ideals. But remember: it’s never ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘when’.

In spring 2014, an old friend Tony Marr asked me to come to Port of Ness to open the new bird hide at Loch Stiapavat at the north end of the island of Lewis in the Western Isles. Tony and I both started birding on the south coast – he is Sussex and me in Hampshire.  He now lives at Cley in North Norfolk but to get some peace when birding he chose to buy a cottage at Port of Ness. There he can birdwatch every day and when he finds rare birds he can watch them without a large gathering of twitchers. I said I’d come back in the autumn and have a few days looking for rare birds with him.

Recently hurricane Joaquin was heading for Scotland from America and I thought that might be worth watching, but it veered off to Portugal. Nevertheless on Sunday I set off on the ferry to Stornoway for two days of birding with Tony. Yesterday was a quiet day – barnacle geese coming in off the sea, a few blackcaps and then great views of sea eagles at Uig in the afternoon, and a glorious sunset at the Callanish stones.

Today, we were out early again with a most beautiful clear sunny morning with all the mountains of Wester Ross and Sutherland showing clearly fifty miles over the Minch.  Tony is a dedicated ‘local patch’ birder – nothing new at the Butt of Lewis lighthouse but a lovely young merlin mobbing a hen harrier. We checked various gardens for migrants but drew a blank, and a careful search of a big flock of golden plovers found no stray American waders. After a visit to the bird hide it was lunch time at his house.

Tony and I have so many old mutual friends that our lunch became extended with tales of old times and favourite stories. Suddenly it’s 2pm and we’re here to bird not talk, so we get our bins and coats and head out again. First stop is next door’s excellent wooded garden and ten minutes later we are watching a Wilson’s Warbler. A small beautiful North American warbler, brilliant yellow with a tiny black crown. The briefest of views before it dives back into the little wood. Twenty-five minutes later we get another good but brief view to confirm our identification.  This is a mega-rarity, being the first ever identified in Scotland, second for Britain and third for Britain and Ireland. There was also a yellow-browed warbler in the garden, all the way from Siberia.

Of course it is Tony’s dedication in birding every day during the migration seasons at the Butt of Lewis which gives him the excitement of finding rare birds and witnessing the annual migrations. But it’s also chance. If we had not regaled each other with stories of old friends we might have visited the garden ten minutes earlier and missed the warbler, and if we had talked too long we might have missed it as well. And then of course you need to be able to identify species you’ve never seen before.

Tomorrow I go home after a brief but brilliant birding trip, with the icing on the cake being a magical Wilson’s Warbler all the way from the States. Great fun with great company. In the morning Tony’s day will be taken up with hosting birders from around the UK keen to see a new bird for their Scottish and  British life lists. I hope it’s still here.

A few years ago, one of the young golden eagles that I was satellite tracking spent two nights at a wooded crag in the Scottish Highlands. I knew this crag as an ancient nest site for golden eagles, which featured on my OS maps of the 1970s but which I had never known occupied. Nor had any of the locals and I think it must have been a record from the middle of the last century or earlier.

I promised the people that own this land that I would come some day to explore the possibility of rebuilding the nest, because golden eagles prefer to use big old nests than start their own. Today was that day, the last day of our beautiful Indian summer which has given us day after day of the most beautiful weather, some little compensation for the miserable weather of this past summer. They had organised an expert rock climber to come with us and at mid-morning the small team from the estate were busy collecting eight bundles of dead sticks in the woods – once I had explained the sort of sticks that eagles prefer to use to build nests. An all-terrain argocat took our equipment and the sticks reasonably close to the crags.

With the estate keeper I walked to the hillside opposite the line of crags and viewed it with binoculars. I could see two places which looked possible as ancient nest sites, so we carried all our gear along the valley to the bottom of the crags. The climber found secure places to anchor the ropes above the cliff, and then clicked me on the double ropes so I could abseil down to the best ledge. He followed closely behind.

When we got there I was amazed to find the remains of an ancient eagles nest, tucked in under a superb overhanging rock. Most of the nest had been overtaken by moss and heather over the decades, and a small conifer obscured the front of the ledge, making it no longer suitable for eagles.

Ancient remains of nest

It was really encouraging to find this evidence and it meant that our task had a real opportunity of being successful. When we arrived at the cliffs some of the team saw an eagle soaring about half a mile to the north, another good omen for our day’s work.

After cutting down the tree on the edge of the ledge, and clearing away most of the moss and debris, it was time to start hauling bundles of sticks up to the nest ledge. The team below clipped each bundle onto the end of our rope, the climber pulled it up and then I arranged the sticks into a big nest. As we built it up, we filled the centre with moss and then with several sacks of dried peat and earth to make a big solid eyrie – well over a metre in diameter and 35 cms high. Finally I decorated the centre of the eyrie with a few sprays of wood rush. This is a favourite plant for eagles to line their nests.

The rebuilt eagle eyrie

The whole purpose was to create a big obvious nest on an ideal crag in a quiet undisturbed part of a Highland estate, where the owners would be proud to have a pair of breeding eagles. This big nest should be easily seen by passing eagles, looking for a home range, and they would think it had been built by a pair of eagles and was now ready to be taken over.  It’s going to be an exciting time to see if sub-adult eagles find the nest, decide that they like it and finally decide that they would like to breed there. If they do then our day’s efforts will have been worth it and will contribute to golden eagle conservation in the Scottish Highlands. On top of that, it was just great fun to be out doing something so practical with a group of friends on a fine October day.