Summertime

Butterflies on buddleia

Its summer time again and that means the research teams are out in the field collecting data. The Snapshot Safari team have been checking up on all the camera trap projects dotted across Africa and adding more to the list at the same time as clocking up adventure stories from their travels. Snapshot Serengeti’s Dr Michael Anderson and his team are continuing with their resource partitioning research in the Serengeti and using the opportunity to check up on the condition of our camera traps, probably, as they do each year, replacing one or two that have malfunctioned or been damaged beyond repair.

So whilst they are doing their part for science I am stuck here in France behind my computer catching up with report writing. Though being summer and me an ecologist it is so very easy to get distracted by the outside world.

This year has been a bonanza year for invertebrate locally. The spring started with a mass eruption of the invasive box moth (Cydalima perspectalis). Literally every blooming flower was coated, snow like with their white bodies; one lime tree in our garden we estimated at over 100 000 moths. The caterpillars have decimated the local box (Boxus spp) forests but I was beginning to wonder what effect the millions of moths would have on food resources for other insects. I needn’t have worried, the box moths have gone and summer blooms have brought out hundreds of other butterflies and beetles, bees and spiders. It is an entomologist’s heaven out there.

This seems to have had a knock on effect in the birds. Never have I discovered so many active birds’ nests near to my house. Several rounds of blackbirds, chaffinches and black red-starts have fledged already and the hedges have been awash with the calls of nightingales, black caps and wrens. The air positively rings with the sound of begging baby birds.

Just two meters from my balcony there is a chaffinch nest in the hibiscus with four babies ready to fledge. It is so close that I barely need binoculars to watch the goings on. This is always a great delight for an ecologist or naturalist because it gives you just that little bit more insight to the nesting habits of common birds.

At first appearance it seems just the female was caring for the young birds but then I realised that every time she arrived, flying in at the base of an adjacent bush and making her way to the nest in stealth mode there was another chaffinch calling loudly from a high point in a not too distant tree. It didn’t take too long to realise that this was the male acting as decoy to draw the attention of any would be predators away from the real action. Once the female finished stuffing hungry beaks with juicy insects and flew off, the male was right behind her only to reappear in his tree top squawking seconds before she arrived back with another beak-full.

Thanks to this pairs faith in nesting close to my house I have had lots of time to watch the great team effort of these little common birds.

So whilst feeling somewhat jealous of my team colleagues who are out enjoying themselves in the African sun it is worth remembering just how much goes on under our very own noses and just how wonderful nature is.