decemberces

Cold and slow - Start of dry season Constant Effort Site ringing

The last 5 days has witnessed very little bird activity around our nets, the APLORI CES has generally been slow. This morning the CES will come to an end with a last session at ACESB, so far only 80 new birds of 32 species and 45 retraps of 24 species have been processed within the last five days. I hope we find a little bit more birds this morning!  We have recorded 4 palearctic migrant species; the Common White-throat, Pied Flycatcher, Tree Pipit and Eurasian Wryneck. Unlike in October no Garden warblers have been trapped, they have consumed our Lantana camara and probably have gone further south, I hope Samtee will be looking out for them when he travels south again.  The retraps have been particularly interesting with three palearctic migrants from previous years, all three have been exciting in some way but one with a notable thrill is an adult Pied flycatcher from January of 2011; this bird has made three trips to Nigeria, minimum of seven flights across the Sahara in the last three years. The Eurasian Wryneck and the Common White-throat have proved some considerable site fidelity; I hope they don't only return to the reserve next year but to the nets. 

I hope we find some interesting stuff later in the day before the nets return to the bags. Next year will be chasing after the Bulbuls; I really hope they cooperate! 

Seasons greeting and See in the New Year :)

Merry Christmas!!!!!!!

Birds in the hand (Mark Wilson, Teaching fellow 8th February - 15th March)

Sunday 10^th March

The past couple of mornings I have got up early and gone wandering in the reserve, trying to make the most of this place before I leave (this Friday!). As a result, I managed to see several of the birds that I had been hearing a lot, but had not got a good look at. These included Tropical Boubou, Yellow-throated Leaflove, Common Wattle-eye, and Brown Babbler. The latter bird I saw two of, wild-eyed and dishevelled, 'duetting' on a branch (if that word can be applied to a pair of birds making noises like they are being strangled while gargling with Listerine). In addition, I saw some birds that I had only heard briefly while out on point counts with Manu, or which were entirely new to me. These included African Blue and Paradise Flycatchers, Yellow White-eye, and a very nice Grey-winged Robin Chat. I also managed to interject myself into a large group of Stone Partridges, which assaulted me from all sides with a barrage of their calls. These sound like escalating outrage being vented by gossiping old women into a microphone attached to stadium-quality speakers. 

Stone Partridges. They look like cute little bantam chickens, but they will make your ears bleed!

This morning, instead of going for another walk, I opened a couple of nets outside the guesthouse, to see if any interesting birds could be convinced to spend a little time with us. I was rewarded with two of the less common sunbirds, (including a stunning male Pygmy Sunbird), a beautiful male Rock Firefinch (one of the this region's endemic species), a couple of Yellow-fronted Tinkerbirds (like tiny, stubby little woodpeckers), a few bitey Village Weavers, a beautiful White-eye and a pair of Red-cheeked Cordon Bleus. However, the best bird of the day was the last one. Bearded Barbet is a close relative of the Tinkerbird, but maybe 10 times the size, with a disproportionately large and fearsome bill. I saw one of these shortly after I arrived, and hoped I would get to see one in the hand. My wish came thoroughly true, as while I held it and Emma took photos, I got to see the bird in my hand, and various uncomfortable portions of my hand in the bird's massive bill.

The odd expression on my face is equal parts happiness, fear and pain. Allegedly Bearded Barbets eat figs, but from the power of its bite I judge that this species probably evolved to feed on bones, or rock, or something encased in titanium.

This last week of my stay will be a week of presentations for (and from) the students. Tomorrow I will give them a talk on oral presentations, an intentionally self-referential exercise that, if I do it well enough, can serve as both explanation and example. On Tuesday each of the students will be giving 5 minute presentations on their project proposals, which they have already worked up in quite a lot of detail. On Thursday the students will be presenting the results of the Distance/Multivariate Stats project they've been working on for the past few weeks. And I've also told them that I'm hoping to teach them all a Scottish dance before I leave. There's the right number of them for either an Eightsome Reel or a Strip the Willow, but I haven't decided which of these would suit best!

To end with, here are some more pics of birds we caught in today's nets. Enjoy!

Mr and Mrs Cordon-Bleu. The female is the one that looks less embarrassed.

Pygmy Sunbird, complete with improbably long tail streamers. One student last week told me that many Nigerians consider it important to dress modestly, but nobody's told the birds here!

Bearded Barbet, displaying its awesome mouthparts. The photo is slightly out of focus, partly because Emma isn't used to using my camera, and partly because she was laughing too hard to hold the camera steady.

A young female Green-headed Sunbird, just coming into adult plumage. I'm sure that iridescent turquoise and olive green would be considered an unwise combination in human colour schemes, but this bird makes them work for her!

Yellow White-eye. Does what it says on the tin, but the bird itself is far more elegant than the prosaically descriptive name.

Winged weeks (Mark Wilson, Teaching fellow 8th February - 15th March)

26^th February

Last night was a night of sensory overload. First it was my sense of smell that was afflicted, by an overwhelming scent of flowers. There's a bush in bloom outside my room, I think it might be Jasmine, whose flowers were powerful enough to give me the sensation I was sleeping in a bowl of pot-puree. The smell is barely noticeable at all this morning, so I reckon the bush is probably pollinated by night-flying beasties such as moths. Hopefully we'll be moth-trapping outside the guesthouse later this week, and the bush could well act as an added draw to supplement the light we'll be using. Anyway, although it was more concentrated than I'd have wished for, I quite like the smell of jasmine, and I wasn't far from sleep when a Long-tailed Nightjar came and sat outside my window.  There are four species of nightjar that have been recorded around Amurum forest – the other three are Freckled (or Rock), Pennant-winged and Standard-winged. I really want to see the latter two, as they both have such ridiculous wing ornaments it would be hard to credit a grounded specimen with the power of flight. However, because nightjars are nocturnal, they are seen more often than they are heard, and all four species here can be distinguished from one another by their song. Freckled Nightjar sounds a bit like the 'plipp' of water dripping from a height into a lightless pool in a cavern underground. Pennant-winged is like a machine gun, each round of which sounds like a high-pitched squeaky hinge, or a Dunnock. Standard-winged sounds like a bunch of bush crickets, and probably blends into the African night-time orchestra from anything but a close distance. Long-tailed, however, sounds like a European Nightjar. Which is to say, like a tonally pure but extremely penetrating pneumatic drill. My first thought was that it couldn't be a nightjar because the sound was too constant and too loud. I thought nightjars sang from the wing (which indicates how little I know of nightjars) and figured the sound should be more varied if coming from a bird in flight. So I searched my room for something like a cicada, or a drilling gnome, and tracked the noise down to my open window. I walked round to the back of the house and the noise stopped instantly. As I approached a long shape detached itself from the ground (the moon has been bright enough these past few nights to allow one to walk around easily after sundown), and flew away. About half an hour later I heard the call again, but this time from a long way off.

A full moon shining all manner of Nigerian wildlife. Though not on many moths.

And literally just now, as if Amurum didn't want my vision to be left out, a Laughing Dove flew in through the main door of the house and perched on top of the kitchen door. The wildlife here is beautiful, varied and full of idiosyncrasy. It is a treat to experience.

Laughing Dove. I've yet to find one that either looks or sounds particularly amused. Maybe I just don't get their sense of humour.

3^rd March

The days and weeks are flying by now.  Less airborne are the hopes for moth trapping that I articulated in the last blog entry. We got the light bulb, and a long cable to connect it to the mains indoors (which is referred to here as "the light"), so I gave it a trial run on Tuesday. We didn't have a white sheet, but I laid some flipboard sheets of paper on the ground beneath it in the hope that at least some of the moths attracted by the light would land on them. The first night we caught one moth with hardly any markings, which I recognised as being a worn individual that we had previously seen inside. I blamed this on a startlingly clear night with a full moon that was giving off enough light to see by quite clearly. The following night was quite cloudy, warm and still – perfect for moth trapping. On the second run we caught one moth of reasonable size, which I'm pretty sure was the same individual we had caught the night before, and about four tiny and nondescript 'micromoths'. I emailed Will to tell him about our disappointing hauls, and he said that this was to be entirely expected at this time of year, and that if you want to moth trap here you do it during (or just after) the wet season, which starts in late April/early May.

What the moth trap didn't attract in terms of moths it made up for in praying mantises, which are very common here now. I do like them, though less so when they fly into my face.

Apart from lack of rain (and moths), what characterises this time of year is Harmattan, a dry wind that comes from the Sahara bearing lots of fine, white dust. This gives everything outside a kind of powdery feel, and is such a predictably pervasive influence that this time of year is often referred to here by the same name. I now realise that what I took to be mist on the drive to APLORI from the airport in Abuja was dust. On windy days there is so much dust in the air that last week, Arrin (one of Emma's field assistants) was helping me to put away a net when I noticed that his arm had turned partly white. When I asked him what had caused it he didn't launch into an explanation about the dust, or the weather, he just said "Harmattan".

The hills you can't really see in the background are obscured by the dust of Harmattan.

I'm almost through my block of formal teaching now, and for the remaining two weeks will be mostly be trying to reinforce some of the new techniques the class has learned (particularly Distance analysis and ordination), and also getting the class to do some presentations, as well as polishing their Masters Project proposals. Progress hasn't been as rapid as I'd originally envisaged, but this is more down to my relative lack of experience teaching in solid blocks like this than to any failings of the students. It's been a steep learning curve for me, and I am better off for it! I'll finish, as per usual, with more gratuitous birds.

A better picture of the bird in last week's blog. This is a male, and reminds me of a huge, exotic Redstart. The female looks quite different, with plumage that is reminiscent of Rock Thrush.

During the late morning, it can seem as if every bird is a Speckled Mousebird. They are quite common, and gang about in large, widely dispersed flocks – a bit like Long-tailed Tits in this respect, as well as in their overly long tails.

This is one of my favourite birds here, and is called a Yellow-crowned Gonolek. Like other bush-shrikes, the male has a distinctive and far-carrying call, which consists of a metallically fluting whistle, usually followed immediately by a hard "chack-kik" from a nearby female – the two calls so closely synchronised that they sound as if they are being made by the same bird. Although one of the most beautifully plumaged birds in the area, they are remarkably hard to get a good look at, as they tend to stay in dense cover.