The week that was

Another quiet winter week but surprisingly quite busy at work so I spent most of the week unfortunately working for the man.  However this week we are doing a nice little job for the London Wildlife Trust at Spencer Road Wetlands and also doing some bird and bat box installations which is the most rewarding kind of work. We should be back at the London Wetland Centre this month too which is always one of our favourite jobs of the year.  

Back at the new rental there has been some mild evenings so the moth trap has been a good respite with a few new species added to the new garden list. Still no Waxwing in the garden or on my travels (still holding out to find my own).

Been getting through Portuguese Rarity Committee work and a couple of papers for Dutch Birding, trying to get the winter work done before the Spring comes. A couple of things caught my eye in my weekly reading particularly a review article in Ibis about the Causes of Vagrancy- certainly seems to be an uptick in research on this subject. I'm still holding out that I got down the main gist of what was going on in this Birdguides/Birdwatch article in 2008 HERE where I've postulated that vagrancy is a no small part of the process of natural selection that leads to the evolution of migration routes and population range change. When I submitted to Birdwatch I mentioned that we should now wait to see how long it takes for that idea to work its way up into professional academic circles. The answer was about 14 years as this paper appeared recently in the Ivory Towers HERE although to be fair lots of researchers have hinted at that in less overstated ways. That's got to be a couple of points for Pleb/Citizen Science right there.  Coincidentally Fred Jiguet also made contact with the exciting news that we might start tagging some of the vagrants on the Azores soon which could be the basis of some work that brings together all our Azores data to push the envelope a bit further on that too. 

Satellite- no migrant Silver-spotted Veneer, Euchromius ocellea unfortunately in the trap which are currently occurring on the south coast- fingers crossed the odd one gets blown inland 

Spring Usher

Chestnut 

Common Quaker- after an early one in December this is presumably the harbinger of the main push 

Drama at the mini-zoo this week after one of the frogs died. We've handed it over to the meal worms to generate a skeleton for us that we can mount and preserve- a work in progress above

Tree of the week. I had 16 jobs to look at this week which is quite unusual for the winter. This beautiful London Plane in Hackbridge needs a little bit of attention. This tree has never been reduced which is what all trees should ideally look like (not always possible if too close to buildings and pavements). All something like this wonderful specimen needs is to remove major dead wood as its over a public space and some big dead branches fell off in the recent winds (which is why we got the call), a light cut back from the surrounding buildings and some thinning of the canopy to reduce the impact of high winds in the future. This tree was next to the river Wandle in Hackbridge (below) on an estate that we covered in our Neighbourhood Plan - preserving this tree was in that plan.