David Rochefort, Consultant Ecologist at RSK Biocensus, shares some experience of his recent participation in a wintering bird survey alongside fellow Consultant Ecologist, Matthew Hull.
Standing almost waist deep in the Thames counting hundreds of lapwing and golden plover flying over our heads was not something we expected when completing a recent wintering bird survey in Oxfordshire as part of my training. But that is where my lead surveyor, Matt Hull, and I found ourselves after multiple days of surveys, often in the pouring rain.
It wasn’t until I changed career in my mid-30s to move away from IT to a more practical and meaningful job in ecology that I found myself looking up more on walks, trying to work out if what I had just seen, or heard, was indeed a chaffinch or a bullfinch. I hadn’t previously taken much interest in bird song, past the occasional appreciation of an incidental sing-songy tune of a mystery bird or a harsh squawk of a corvid. But having discovered a keen interest in birds at university, I joined RSK Biocensus as my first full-time ecology job, and have been given many chances to shadow and train since then, resulting in this specific wintering bird survey training where my audio ID skills are being put to the test.
Back to being in a river: we were on our last of three days of surveys across different sites, ranging from arable land encroached by ancient woodland, incidental mosaic habitats amongst surrounding farmland, to a field adjacent to this river which had completely flooded and had now claimed half of a field that our transect line passed straight through.
We had seen, and heard, a great assemblage of species including migrating crossbills, a murmuration of (an estimated) 100,000+ starlings to the backdrop of a pink sunset, hundreds of skylarks warming up for the upcoming breeding season and a full range of expected passerines, raptors and the occasional wetland bird, all of which provided an amazing challenge to my improving audio skills.
Five or so years ago I would have had trouble recognising a robin in a small parcel of woodland, let alone knowing that further in you could just make out a great tit alarm calling, a goldcrest in subsong, a song thrush contact calling and a wagtail flying over uttering its entertaining “chisick” call.
I changed my career to be more active, to talk to interesting people about how animals interact with the world and to experience it first-hand. And that day, standing in the pouring rain with my bottom half soaked to the bone whilst developing my bird ID skills so that I can one day lead on these surveys myself, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
As well as David and Matthew, our other highly skilled ornithologists have also been busy over the winter undertaking non-breeding bird surveys across the country, you can read about this and out first birding yearlist here!