Readers’ wildlife photos

This is the second part of a batch of photos sent in by Neil K. Dawe from Vancouver Island, British Columbia. (His first batch, showing a visit to Darwin’s Down House is here.) Neil’s captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica) is a fairly common species in Britain. It was formerly considered conspecific with the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) of North America and many authorities still consider them the same species. The magpie belongs to the corvid family, a group of some of the smartest birds including crows, ravens, and jays. The magpie is one of the few animals that is known to have self-awareness: an individual can pass the mirror test, recognizing itself in its mirrored reflection. Here’s a link to Ian Tyson’s descriptive song about this “pretty bird”:

 The Eurasian Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) is another member of the corvid family, a common species throughout most of Britain. Jackdaw means “small crow”:

The Eurasian Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) is common at feeders and was a familiar bird everywhere we went in Britain. It is known for its habit, first observed in the 1920s, of pecking through milk-bottle tops to sip the cream. Other blue tits quickly learned this behaviour through observation and by the 1950s most of Britain’s Eurasian Blue Tit population had learned this behaviour. However, with the advent of supermarkets and the stopping of doorstep milk delivery the habit has since died out. Interestingly, some European Robins (Erithacus rubecula) also acquired this behaviour but it never spread to the entire robin population as it did with the blue tits.

The Great Tit (Parus major) was a common bird in most of the places we visited on our travels. Since spring temperatures have been increasing due to climate heating, a mismatch has occurred between the hatching of nestling tits and the peak caterpillar hatch, an important food for nestlings. This has caused a selection for earlier Great Tit egg-laying dates by up to 11 days and a shortening of the fledging period by 3–4 days. Second broods are also now more common:

The European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) gave its name to the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) whose reddish breast reminded early European Settlers of this familiar European bird:

The Dunnock (Prunella modularis), nicknamed the “hedge sparrow” has cooperative nesting behaviour, most often in the form of polyandry with two males and a female tending the nest and young. Polygyny has been reported to a lesser extent:

In Britain, males of the Common Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) tend to overwinter near their breeding areas while the females migrate further south, hence the male nickname “bachelor finch”:

The European Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) is a favourite cagebird in parts of its range. One study found it to be extinct or very scarce in the wild in much of Algeria and Tunisia but estimated a captive population of 15.6 million across the entire western Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). The practice of catching and keeping caged migratory birds is no longer allowed in Britain: