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.