May 2015 – Nest box nooky

May has us continuing to monitor nest sites so that we can collect a robust set of breeding parameter data for the field season. We’ve ended up with 25 accessible nests in use, which is the largest number since starting the project 3 years ago. And we finally have rollers using 2 of the nest boxes! At the start of the month females were still laying, but in the last few days of the month (as I write) we finally have chicks in them. Hopefully this is an indication that the boxes just needed some time to bed in and that they’ll start to be more frequently used from now on.

Finally!

 

The other cavity nesters in the study area are also now underway with breeding. We have scops owls nesting in three of our nest boxes (with another pair turfed out from a natural nest site by a pair of rollers in Theletra Gorge) and a pair of kestrels nesting alongside a roller pair in an old village building.

What you lookin' at?!

Young kessies

 

Other than nest monitoring, Harry and I have been trying to complete habitat mapping for all of the newly identified nest sites and also make a start on this year’s invertebrate transects. We’ve kept our eyes open whilst out and about though, stumbling across a few nice birds in the study area. A few record shots below of the highlights (although none sadly of the adult male barred warbler or flyover lesser spotted eagle at Androlikou).

Honey buzzard- a scarce Spring migrant in
 Cyprus, and one of two on the deck

Pink stink; a Cyprus rarity

 

April 2015 – The beginning of the end

What will probably be my last field season in Cyprus kicked off with a madcap dash around the study area to check on the state of the 40 nest boxes which were deployed last year. Unfortunately 10 of them had met a sticky end; whoever pinched them, I hope they proved useful in their new incarnations. At least one had met a fate similar to that met by a large number of avian victims here each year. Some people really are idiots.

 

An ex-nest box

Happily, 30 of the nest boxes are still in place, although the honeybees and rats have refused to relinquish their hold on a couple of them. One thing that really struck me this year is just how green it is here currently! Cyprus had a lot of snow over the winter, with snowcaps still obvious to the naked eye on the high Troodos. It’ll be interesting to see what effect this has on roller breeding success this year, following the disastrous 2014 season.

 

Looking west across Evretou Reservoir
 

Akoursos

Given the unseasonal greenness and damp soils, I did think to check under a few large rocks for any herpetological niceties that might be present whilst doing my rounds of the nest boxes. This culminated in finding a couple of lovely Kotschy’s geckos and, best of all, several worm snakes. These subterranean living reptiles are weird looking little things; like scaly worms with healed-over eyes. When you handle them they try and prick you with a small spiky scale at the end of their tail. Weird little things. The generally cool temperatures have meant that snakes are only just coming out of hibernation, so we’re seeing plenty of bully-boy blunt-nosed vipers too.   

 

Not a worm!

The rollers themselves are late back from Africa this year, with the first bird appearing back at Androlikou several days after I arrived. We did have some excellent news in the form of a returnee roller still bearing its GPS logger backpack! We managed to catch the bird (a female) at the nest and remove the logger, but unfortunately it’d received some minor damage and we’ve had to send it back to the UK to try and download its data. I’m now waiting with baited breath to see how much migration data it holds!

Logger ahoy!

 

I was joined mid-month by my birding friend and field assistant for the season; Harry. Since his arrival we’ve mainly been trying to confirm roller pairs back at last year’s nest sites (especially logger birds) and also to identify additional nest sites that we can monitor. We currently have birds back at most of last year’s nests, and have also managed to identify several spatially independent localities which is great news.   

A new nest site and its owner

 

As always at this time of year in Cyprus, migration is in full swing and we’ve managed to do a bit of birding around the edges of our fieldwork requirements. I’ve provided a few photos of some nice bits and bobs below. Highlights for me included an absolutely cracking Caspian plover (at Mandria) and much-wanted hooded wheatear (on Paphos Headland), as well as finding a record flock of less-than-annual bar-tailed godwit at Akrotiri.

 

Caspian plover



Hooded wheatear
 

Part of a record flock of 32 bar'wits

 



Baillon's crake
 



Purple heron

 

Rock thrush

Blue-cheeked bee-eaters

Red-footed falcon

Slender-billed gull

March 2015 – Conferences galore

March has been a busy month for me as I presented my work at three different conferences. The annual ‘Rebellion’ at UEA was fun and interesting as always, the international Student Conference on Conservation Science at Cambridge University was a fascinating experience, and the BTO’s annual Spring conference was the pick of the bunch.  

 

The latter was co-convened by my Primary Supervisor at UEA (Dr Aldina Franco) and was entitled ‘Birds in time and space: avian tracking and remote sensing’. There were some fantastic presentations given, including excellent talks by my PhD colleagues Tom and Nathalie on their work with rollers and white storks. I presented a poster on the preliminary findings of the GPS logger data from Cyprus. Take a look at those lovely polygons!

 

Excerpt from BTO conference poster

 

It was also great to catch up with host of other researchers, including Dr’s Chris Hewson and Phil Atkinson from the BTO and some of the guys from the Lund Migration ecology course Tom and I attended a couple of years back. Always a nice way to spend some time.

Autumn/Winter 2014 – Fun and games with models

Following my return to UEA I’ve again spent most of my time processing and analysing data from the 2014 field season. As of September I’m officially in the third year of my PhD (gulp!) and so have started to work on drafting chapters for my thesis too. This has meant getting to grips with modelling in R, which has proven to be an equally fascinating and frustrating exercise! I’ve mainly been working on producing a Habitat Suitability Map for the European roller in Cyprus, using road transect data collected by Alessandro and me in the spring. I’m also cleaning up the noise in the GPS logger data we downloaded from foraging birds in 2014, and am nearly at the stage where I can produce some kernels. Watch this space…

July 2014 – Season’s end

The first couple of weeks of July always feel a bit like a mopping up exercise, as I wander around the study area doing the last few bits of habitat mapping and nest site parameter measurements. This year was slightly different, as I strived to remotely download as much data as possible from the deployed GPS loggers. Sadly, with all of the breeding pairs already dispersed into the wider landscape with their new fledglings, no more data was forthcoming. The loggers seemed to work extremely well on the whole though, so hopefully we can get some interesting information on roller foraging behaviour from them. And fingers crossed that the birds return to Cyprus next spring with some juicy migration data on board!    

Late June 2014 - Total washout

The start of June coincided with some of the wettest and coldest spring weather that Cyprus has experienced for over a decade. Worse still, this is the period when the roller eggs are beginning to hatch… The chicks are featherless and blind when they first leave the egg, and the cold and wet conditions hit them on two fronts. Not only were they shivering inside the nest cavity, they were also starving as their parents struggled to find invertebrate prey in the cold and wet conditions outside.

One of the few roller chicks to reach
fledging this year...

Following this disastrous week, predation levels at the surviving nest sites were really high too. I’m guessing that the predatory species were just as stressed as the rollers, with the relatively accessible nest cavities providing easy pickings for a range of other species. By the end of the month only 10 of the 22 nest sites being monitored this year had fledged any chicks, with clutches in the rest either being predated or starved.

 

Scops owl squatter on eggs

 

Had any of the roller pairs decided to use one of the newly deployed nest boxes then I like to think that the outcome may have been slightly different (at least in terms of predation risk). However, the only creatures choosing to occupy them this year were scops owls, rats, and bees. Fingers crossed that the boxes just require a winter to ‘bed in’ before they become attractive to the rollers.

 

Fluffy scops owl chicks a few
weeks later

 

 

Early June 2014 - Second time lucky

We’ve just concluded a busy catching period, coinciding with the roller chicks being at least one week old. At this stage they are less prone to disturbance and are more regularly visited at the nest by their parents. Alessandro and I were again joined by Chris from the BTO, and also by my primary PhD supervisor Dr Aldina Franco from UEA, as we used various techniques to try and trap the adult birds. Mist nets strung across the nest entrance again proved the most effective method, although we also tried landing nets, playback with dummies, and clap traps (all with limited success). We did end up deploying the novel GPS loggers on 10 rollers though, and also managed to retrieve a geolocator from one of last year’s birds; which is great!

 

A roller in the process of being
fitted with a GPS logger. The hood
keeps the bird calm during the
 handling process.

 

Aside from the ongoing nest monitoring and the collecting of breeding parameters from each of the roller pairs within the study area, we’ve been continuing with the population survey road transects and also carrying out walked invertebrate transects. The latter should provide us with data on prey abundance and diversity within the different habitat types that the rollers use throughout the breeding season, and hopefully allow us to investigate any relationship between surrounding habitat type and nest site productivity.

 

 

May 2014 - Busy, busy, busy…

Having spent the past couple of months on my lonesome, I’ve now been joined by UEA Master’s student Alessandro Gravano for the next two months. He and I will be carrying out road transect surveys across the study area in an attempt to produce a revised roller population estimate for Paphos District.

 

I’ve also had visits from Dr Chris Hewson from the BTO, and Dr’s Ines and Teresa Catry (Ines is one of my PhD supervisors) from Portugal, during which we tried to catch the adult rollers at their nest sites with the aim of removing geolocators and deploying the new GPS loggers. This proved trickier than expected early in the season though, as the birds are even warier than usual when they are incubating. After limited success we decided to schedule a revised trapping period, when the rollers are feeding chicks and they are a little easier to catch, in a few weeks’ time.

 

Eggsies

And a few days later...

 

Most of the birds are now on eggs, although a few of the early nesting pairs already have eggs that are starting to hatch. It’s really important to record the laying and hatching dates/rates at each of the accessible nests, so this has been taking up most of my time of late. There’s been quite a lot of disturbance around some of the nest sites, with one of the Chrysochou nests receiving daily disturbance from an archaeological team doing exploratory ground works below them! That particular pair seem relatively unshaken by the experience, luckily.     

 

Time Team-type disturbance

 

April 2014 - I spy

The first roller arrived back on territory at Androlikou on 2^nd April, just a few days after the last nest box was put up. It remains to be seen whether the birds find the new bijou accommodation to their liking. Hopefully the nest boxes will prove attractive so, failing that, I’ve spent much of the month trying to confirm the return of roller pairs to last year’s nest sites and identifying new ones.

 

The first roller of the spring back
at Androlikou

  

Considering what obvious and brightly-coloured birds rollers are, it can be extremely tricky to locate their nest cavities when they’re not using nest boxes. They are extremely wary when approaching the nest site and also often forage several hundred metres from it. I’ve racked up many days-worth of observation time trying to follow pairs of birds back to likely nest site locations, only to find that the nest entrance is located 20m up a cliff face and therefore out of the range of my trusty ladder. I have had some successes though, and the number of accessible nest localities is now approaching my minimum target of 20.

 

Yet another inaccessible nest site...

An accessible nest site! Spot the roller pair...

 

As well as searching for nests, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time trying to confirm whether or not any of the geolocator birds from last year have returned safely from Africa. It’s looking promising, as at least three colour-ringed birds have been re-sighted so far, but I won’t be able to definitely say whether they still have the geolocators attached until I have the birds in the hand.

 

View across the east of the study area: most
 flat areas of land are farmed in some way.

 

Aside from my research, I’ve been lucky enough to go out ringing on a couple of occasions with a team from the University of Cyprus (based in Nicosia). They are carrying out work on the endemic Cypriot subspecies of scops owl, and the interactions between the endemic Cyprus warbler and other Sylvia warbler species.

 

Cypriot scops owl

Sardinian warbler

Hoopoe

 

Migration is at its peak in early to mid-April, and there are birds everywhere right now. However, the most impressive observation I’ve had recently was the massive sustained painted lady butterfly migration through the island for several days mid-month. Huge numbers were seen migrating in a north-westerly direction across the study area, and I was also lucky enough to find at least five plain tiger butterflies (an incredibly scarce African migrant species in Cyprus) mixed up in the tumult.

 

Painted ladies

Plain tiger (via wikicommons)

 

The bee-eaters are just starting to move through now though, which means that spring migration is approaching its endpoint and the rollers will soon be on eggs…

 

Collared flycatcher in the garden

Great spotted cuckoo

Red-footed falcon and lesser kestrel

Little egrets

Ortolan bunting

Bee-eaters having a dust bath

 

March 2014 - Nest box shenanigans

I arrived in Cyprus this year in early March; the idea being that I’ll have time to collect the newly shipped nest boxes from Limassol Port and install them before the first rollers arrive back on territory at the end of the month. Thus ensued a Whacky Races-style drive around Limassol docks as I tried to locate the warehouse holding the new arrivals (including a sudden veer off the road when I spotted a pied kingfisher (a Cyprus rarity) sat on wires alongside the port road!) It soon transpired that it isn’t actually possible to fit 18 large wooden boxes inside a small hire car in one go either, so I racked up the mileage over a few days as I ferried them back piecemeal to the Paphos study area.

 

Pied kingfisher - No. 1 cause of road
accidents in Cyprus

 

It’s probably about time that I also disclose that I have a new love in my life… My newly purchased inflatable roof-rack! No longer do I have to lash my Nemesis (AKA the ladder) onto the hire car roof with random pieces of rope and dog blankets, nor risk destroying the paintwork with it. It’s definitely increased my fieldwork efficiency twofold, and exponentially decreased the number of ladder-induced bruises across my body.

 

My trusty steed for the field season,
surmounted by the inflatable Better Half

 

I’ve been installing the 22 new boxes, and redeploying the 18 from last year, for much of the month. I decided that the older nest boxes had originally been deployed at too high a density to make them useful in providing spatially independent data points (should the rollers choose to use them). This has meant removing them from their original positions and installing them, alongside the new ones, across the study area at approximately 1km intervals. Some of the older boxes are already in a slightly parlous state. Upon removing an unexpectedly heavy one from an almond tree at Androlikou, it became clear that the local rodent population had taken a particular liking to it and had filled it to the brim with almond shells!

 

Nuts

 

Another unexpected problem arose when the clutch on hire car decided to snap in half underfoot whilst I was carrying out a three point turn in the middle of a rural junction. I think that the hire car reps who finally delivered a replacement car were somewhat bemused by the presence of a large folding ladder and 10 large nest boxes on the side of the road…

 

Fail...

Even more fail...

 

Despite the various ups and downs, I have managed to get all 40 nest boxes up and in place before the rollers arrive back on territory. Fingers crossed that they like the look of them! Migration is already in full swing here; I’ve provided a few record shots of some nice bits and bobs that I’ve seen over the last few weeks.  

 

The finished article

Ruppell's warbler

Levant (aucheri) grey shrike: a handful of
previous Cypriot records

Female desert wheatear

Red-throated pipits