QUERIES from readers of this Country Diary are always more than welcome although at times they can be frustrating, mainly because of my lack of knowledge or understanding.
A common query is over identification with many of these, but not all, the result of more and more people feeding and watching birds in their own gardens.
The problem is over descriptions of birds as different people latch onto different aspects of the bird whether it be size, colour or behaviour. It has been said that if you read out all the identification features of a male chaffinch, for example, very few people would able to identify it. Whether this is true or not I cannot say but it would not surprise me from my experience.
Apart from the description, the main problems is size. Different people have different ideas. Books often do not help as, for example, they may say a bird is slightly larger than a house sparrow. That is fine if by chance you happen to have a house sparrow sat next to the bird you are trying to identify.
What has helped in recent years has been the development of digital photography and e-mail queries over identification are often accompanied by an attachment which has a photograph with it.
Such was the case recently over a buzzard/golden eagle that some tourists had seen on the main Garve to Ullapool road. They had seen the bird sat on an outcrop of rock and then flying and they had a reasonable image with their camera. They so wanted it to be a golden eagle as it would, in retrospect, make their holiday. It was a clear cut case, for a change, and it was in fact a golden eagle and not a buzzard. I would like to talk about the head showing more prominently than a buzzard's would and the tail in the eagle was longer. However, it was easier as the bird was a juvenile with the tell tale white under tail feathers and the white under the wings.
Some time ago there was an identification query from near Garve where the reader was convinced she had a nutcracker in her garden as it did not fit the photographs in any of her books. From the description I suggested it may be a juvenile blackbird that often have a wide variety of colour patterns particularly on their body. Then I suggested other birds but all to no avail as she was adamant she had a nutcracker coming to the peanuts.
By sheer chance only last week I had a query over a garden bird from near Fort William and again the reader was convinced it was nutcracker and not only that they had two or three of them. Both these readers went to great lengths to get someone to take photographs and e-mailed them to me. In both cases the bird(s) in question were juvenile starlings. The birds were just moulting out of their overall brown juvenile plumage with some patterned feathers of the adult plumage showing through.
Colours on birds seem to play tricks in the amount and distribution and such was the case earlier this year with two birds, both in different gardens. One bird was described to me as a blackbird size bird that was black with a red tail and I really had no idea I then agreed to go the person's house and see the bird which regularly came into the garden. It was a great spotted woodpecker!
The second red bird was described as a dark colour with red feathers when it flashed its wings. It spent some time going up and down walls apparently feeding on something. I could just not think of any bird that met this description.
Then the reader brought along a photograph and there, sitting on a garden wall, was a crossbill.
With identification of birds in mind readers often ask me which bird books I use. The two I use the most about birds, whatever the query or for my information, are "RSPB Handbook of Scottish Birds" by Peter Hodlen and Stuart Housden, Helm 2009, and the two volumes of "The Birds of Scotland" by Ron Forrester et al. SOC 2007.
Oh deer - where is our venison going?
THE highlight of the week was in fact a very worrying one that came about because of the recent campaign to make people more aware of the problems facing butterflies these days.
I remarked in this column, when covering this, that one large superstore was supporting this. All credit to them and to the other stores in the UK that have a conservation image.
As it happened I was in the superstore in question in Inverness a few days later and was buying some venison. I was aghast to see it was labelled as "from deer farms in New Zealand."
So I made a brief survey of other stores in Inverness and found all of them source their venison from New Zealand. So in the heart of the red deer and venison trade in the UK superstores are buying their venison from New Zealand. Is it because the New Zealand government financially support such trade? Do the deer farms over there get government grants whereas ours do not?
Perhaps someone should look into this anomaly which I just do not understand. I am told, repeatedly, there is a glut of venison in the Highlands so where is it all going? Anyone any ideas?
