Some birds of the Suffolk coast

SOME BIRDS OF THE SUFFOLK COAST.

SOME BIRDS OF THE BY

FREDERICK

SUFFOLK C.

135

COAST.

COOK.

is, as D r . Hazelfoot Haines f r o m years' experience round Saxmundham asserts (in lit. 8 Nov. 1944), " a splendid County for Birds " ; and I regret so small a variety of their species has come under my Observation during the last twelve months, though they have not been without their restricted interest. One or two Black Redstarts, Phcenicurus Tithys, Scop., were noted at various parts of Lowestoft about the end of M a r c h and early in April, but these were evidently en voyage for they stayed for only a short time.

Actually it was not tili 20 April that we detected the pair, which eventually did breed here, frequenting the neighbourhood of one of those nesting sites detailed at our Transactions, page 128 supra.

At that time they were moving about a good deal and visiting various buildings over a wide area of the town ; the male, still in his immature plumage, did not sing as vigorously or often as those we had had under Observation in previous years : this fact m a d e it the more difficult to keep in touch with the present pair. T h e i r nest was located by a war-firewatcher who one evening, after a party of us ornithologists had spent an hour or so vainly searching in all likely situations, approached us and, laughing in his sleeve, offered to reveal its site. So we, somewhat taken aback, followed him u p two flights of stairs to the top room of a warehouse ; and there he pointed to the nest, already containing three young, resting upon a beam above a window. All the three were successfullv reared, and had left this nest by the evening of 22 May. SUFFOLK

T h e same hen was discovered by me on 15 June, sitting upon her second brood of five freshly-hatched young ; this nest was built in a Situation similar to the first one, and in the same warehouse, though now u p o n its ground floor. W e visited the site as little as was judicious, because the nest could be seen through an ironbarred window f r o m the roadway and, naturally, we were anxious to avoid drawing attention to it. All these eight nestlings were ringed w h e n about ten days old ; so that we were enabled to teil that, after they had flown, they stayed in the vicinity of their nests for several weeks. All that time we often had the pleasure of observing one or two of them, now fully grown, bearing a quite distinctive ring.

Close to the same nesting-site M r . E. W . C. Jenner noticed in very early August, Capt. L . W. Lloyd and I soon afterwards, three or four juvenile Black-redstarts that still retained a suggestion of down u p o n their heads. These birds boasted of no leg-rings and were too immature to pertain to a second brood ; hence it becomes likely that a third brood was brought off by the same parents somewhere in the former Situation. Such becomes the more probable when our ignorance of other parents in Lowestoft this

136

SOME BIRDS OF THE SUFFOLK COAST.

summer is borne in mind, though the third brood cannot be accepted as proved. The above male had assumed fĂźll adult plumage by 5 September ; and was last observed on 25th when he, accompanied by a second Black-redstart who was doubtless his above mate, and adjacent to two others who were probably their progeny, was still frequenting the nesting-site in the warehouse.

In Blythburgh Fen three Spoonbills, Platalea leucorodia, Linn., were seen on 26 july, when five Green Sandpipers, Tringa ochropus, Linn., were flushed from the very spot where others of the same species had been observed in previous years. At Lowestoft Ness Point six Black Terns, Chlidonias niger, Linn., were resting upon the beach on 8 August; and there a Little Gull, Larus minutus, Pall., was seen on 1 October.

The local press on 24 October published a curious account of a vast horde of Starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, Linn., that descended on the night of the 2Ist about a Searchlight Station in the Lowestoft area. So numerous was the horde that many branches were torn from adjacent Oak-trees by the Birds' mere weight when settled upon them ; though, more exactly, it was the Birds' combined kick-off when they ' exploded ' out of the tree which caused the cleavage, as one of the Searchlight men who had actually heard the fracture explained to me, when I visited the Station a few nights later. I was fascinated by what I saw : in the slowly revolving and almost vertical beam there wavered in bewilderment and panic migrating Birds, that it was almost impossible to identify by sight, as all were rendered intensely silvery by the brilliant light. Fieldfares, Redwings, Blackbirds, Thrushes and Skylarks were all determined by their specific calls. An occasional Bird came fluttering down the beam on to the lantern, with apparently complete immunity ; but numerous Moths, like luminous fireflies, floated thence, on the other hand, to their doom. Very high up a large and compact flock of Birds, looking like some kind of Waders, persisted in circling around for fully a half-hour.

Other Searchlight stations in the district were similarly swamped

by Starlings on the 21 s t ; and, when I was shown the Oaks that had suffered dismemberment that night of their invasion, I found the ground below them strewn with branches of surprising size, along with twigs and leaves. Upon examining the larger of these branches, one could hardly credit that Birds, in what numbers soever, could have caused their fall ; for one of those I measured at six inches from the point of fracture was no less than 4 1 | inches in circumference, and another 3 4 | inches. [The 'fall' of the year may well have contributed something to the wood's brittleness, even in Oaks.—Ed.] But such an incursion is quite rare : again two nights later I visited the Searchlight, when the moon shone serenely out of a clear sky, and throughout the entire welkin neither Bird nor Moth could be picked up by the rotating beam.