Watching pheasants come home to roost

Country pheasant

THE roosting of birds has always fascinated me as it was one of the reasons I first started writing wildlife columns more years ago than I care to recall.

I was a bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology and I used to go out at night to ring house sparrows.

The birds roosted in a tall thick hedge and they were such a common bird most people tended to ignore them and took no interest in them. We used a net on one side on the hedge and then shone a torch and the birds would fly into the net. We then ringed and measured them and just released them back into the hedge and they just sat there back in their roost.

A local paper heard about this and sent a reporter along as ringing birds was something just way out in those days. The end result was that the editor contacted me and asked me to write a weekly column called "Nature Notes" and so it all began. Because of the reaction of readers, writing has been one of the most fascinating aspects of my life-long interest in wildlife conservation and it still never fails to thrill me.

Over the years, I have seen a number of roosts actually forming and one memorable one was swallow roosts in a reed bed east of Inverness.

The aerial flights of the swallows is, to my mind, just as spectacular as the much heralded ones on starlings so much exploited by the media. I once recall mist netting at one such swallow roost a few years ago and there was a completely white bird in the flock of around a hundred birds. On one occasion it missed the nets by a foot or so and was a heart stopping moment but we never did catch it.

I have been just as fascinated by where garden birds roost, despite the fact that I cannot recall, until last week, any actually going to roost. Just occasionally, I have disturbed the odd bird when I used the put the ducks and hens away late in the evening. However, I really have no idea where any of the garden birds actually go to roost. I have heard of wrens assembling and going into their winter roost, a communal one, into a nestbox but I have ever actually seen this myself.

Some birds vary in their roosting places. For example, I have always been fascinated why pheasants sometimes roost on the ground although their normal roosting place is in trees.

Roosting on the ground for birds like a pheasant must make them easy prey for any would-be predators such as fox.

They reckon that female pheasants, and other nesting birds for that matter, do not give off a scent. I find this difficult to accept but there is no way I can prove it one way or another.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I did actually see two birds go to roost.

It was a pair of pheasants in the middle of the last cold spell and I could not help but see them. They went into the tall larch tree on the island of the pond just beneath my study window. There was a great deal of wing flapping and calling from the cock pheasant to start with and I look at the base of the tree and with the cock bird was a female pheasant. It was one of the dark form of plumage, almost black, that had been frequenting the garden for a few weeks.

Then there was subtle change in behaviour, as if the birds had made up their mind just where they were going to spend the night.

The cock bird flew up into one of the upper branches of the larch tree first and looked rather ungainly on such a thin branch but it persisted. It then started croaking which is the only way I can describe its call notes that were soft and low. It was as if he was enticing the female and after a short while she flew up onto a branch just below.

Then there seemed to a be a period of indecision as the birds seemed to jostle for position.

A couple of times the hen seemed to be ill at ease and just flew down to the island. Each time, however, she then flew back up with the same call notes coming from the cock. When I crept out of my study they had long been lost to my eyes in the darkness. I wondered how they fared as, wind wise, it was wild night.

Readers spot goats galore!

THE records of the week have been the results of the survey on wild goats mentioned recently in this column.

There has been a very good response from readers and I am very grateful for all that have contributed. Reports by email have come in from as far afield as Ardgour near Fort William, Dundonnel near Ullapool and several other places.

Interestingly, there have been one or two "new", as far as I can tell, records. I have been following up all the contributions and they will all be summarised in a future column in a couple of weeks' time.

In the meantime, please send in any records you may have even if you think other people will have covered them.

I still have no records from any of the Western Isles, none from Sutherland at all, and none from one of the many places I was particularly interested in, which is Munlochy Cliff, just north of Inverness.