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machine guns at dawn17th Apr 2026Machine guns at dawn
Early spring is the time for display: selling your sexual wares, and carving out real estate. In the cool of dawn, when wind is slight, and the clarity of light is yet to be established, birds make their positions clear. Song and contact calls are the order of the day.
In the grey gloaming, the second warbler visit took place, a few weeks after the scene-setter. The first sketched out the framework, and the second was due to fill in the gaps.
Blackcap numbers were up, but large voids remained: slots where there are normally birds were silent, and the garden warblers are still, with a notable exception, to arrive. The result was a battle betweeen chiffchaffs and blackcaps for spatial dominance. Ecological overlaps are few, so resource competition is minimal. It was very much blackcap v blackcap. Song was part of the game, but most of the inter-pair discussions were through the repeated chack-chack call note. In the denser scrub/ fallen tree areas the sound was constant and almost intimidatory. Birds moved, and moved again, loosing off their salvoes of scatter guns.
Stepping back, the map confirms that we have voids, where there are normally birds. Hopefully, these will fill in time.
The enigmas also apply to water levels. Some of the lakes are up -though direct rains have been few, whilst others are down. What of the nightingales? Nothing, other than slipped phrases in two blackcaps. I wonder where they learnt those; they are very much the antithesis of machine guns . |
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