Alle afleveringen van Tweet of the Day – pagina 13 van 15

Golden Plover

13 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the Golden Plover. If, among a flock of lapwings circling over a ploughed field, you see smaller birds with wings like knife-blades and bell-like calls ... these are golden plovers.

Black-Headed Gull

12 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the Black-Headed Gull.
Black-Headed Gulls are our commonest small gull and throughout the year you can identify them by their rather delicate flight action, red legs and the white flash on the front edge of their wings.

Siskin

11 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the Siskin. Siskins are visiting our gardens as never before. These birds now breed across the UK and cash in on our love of bird-feeding. They are now regular visitors to seed dispensers of all kinds.

Wader roost

8 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games tells the story of the flocks of waders which are drawn to the UK's estuaries. Britain's estuaries contain around 2,900 square kilometres of mud and sand-flats. Washed daily by the tides, these places are packed with food, molluscs, worms and crustaceans that support thousands of waders.

Bar-tailed Godwit

7 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the Bar-tailed Godwit. Bar-tailed godwits are waders which occur around the globe and are now known to make the longest non-stop journey of any migratory bird.

Barnacle Goose

6 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the barnacle goose. Yapping like terriers, skeins of barnacle geese leave their roosts on mud-flats and fly inland at dawn to feed in grassy fields.

Redshank

5 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the Redshank. Redshanks spend the winter on our estuaries and wetlands, taking food from the surface of the mud and probing the ooze for creatures which live beneath.

Curlew

4 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the story of the curlew. The UK is a vital wintering ground for flocks of curlews. Some birds fly in from as far away as Belgium and Russia, probing our coastal mudflats and thrilling us with their mournful cries.

Jackdaw

1 november 2013 · 2 min

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Martin Hughes-Games presents the jackdaw. Jackdaws are scavengers with a reputation for stealing shiny or glittering objects. Martin Hughes-Games tells the story of a tame jackdaw he had as a child, which became a very colourful member of the family, with her very own store of costume jewellery to play with.

Mourning Dove

31 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Mourning Dove. On a November evening at the end of the last Millennium, Maire MacPhail looked through the window of her home on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides to see an odd pigeon sitting on the garden fence. It looked tired, as well it might have done, for it turned out to be only the second mourning dove to occur naturally in the British Isles.

The sound archive recording of the mourning dove featured in this programme was sourced from :
Andrew Spencer, XC109033. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/109033.

Bobolink

30 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Bobolink. You might never have heard of a Bobolink – but these birds do occur very rarely in the UK although their true home is in the grasslands of Canada and the northern states of the USA. They look like large finches but belong to the family of New World blackbirds. Because the breeding males have black and white plumage they are sometimes called 'skunk blackbirds'.

The sound archive recording of the bobolink featured in this programme was sourced from The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Firecrest

29 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Firecrest. Firecrests are very small birds, a mere nine centimetres long and are often confused with their much commoner cousins, goldcrests. Both have the brilliant orange or yellow crown feathers, but the firecrest embellishes these with black eyestripes, dazzling white eyebrows and golden patches on the sides of its neck ... a jewel of a bird.

Shore Lark

28 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Shore Lark. Shore Larks are also known as horned larks because in the breeding season the male birds sprout a pair of black crown feathers which look like satanic horns, but at any time of year the adult larks are striking birds. They are slightly smaller than a skylark but with a yellow face, a black moustache and a black band on the chest.

Cattle Egret

25 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Cattle Egret. Cattle egrets were originally birds of the African savannahs but they have become one of the most successful global colonisers of any bird species. In 2008 a pair of cattle egrets made ornithological history by breeding in the UK, on the Somerset Levels, for the first time.

Leach's Storm Petrel

24 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Leach's Storm-Petrel. Only the most far-flung islands around our coasts provide sanctuary for Leach's Storm-Petrels, one of the most difficult of our breeding birds to see. Chris Watson tells the story of a perilous 2am climb he made to record the sounds of Leach's Storm-Petrel's in their breeding burrows on cliff ledges on the Island of Hirta in the St Kilda group.

Sooty Shearwater

23 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Sooty Shearwater. Sooty Shearwaters are rather scarce seabirds around our islands as they breed on islands off South America and the coasts of eastern Australia and New Zealand. After breeding, the shearwaters head north to feeding grounds in the North Pacific and North Atlantic undertaking one of the longest journeys of any migratory animal.

Yellow-browed Warbler

22 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Yellow-Browed Warbler. The delicate yellow-browed warbler breeds in Siberia and winters in south-east Asia. Several hundred birds, sometimes many more, turn up each autumn anywhere between the Isles of Scilly and Shetland.

Crested Tit

21 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Crested Tit. Although crested tits are quite common in Continental Europe, they are confined in the UK to the central Highlands of Scotland. They're the only small British bird with a crest so identification shouldn't be a problem and their black eye-stripe contrasts well with their grey and white face.

Goldcrest

18 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Goldcrest. Goldcrests are, by a whisker, our smallest bird - roughly nine centimetres long and the weight of a ten pence coin. They migrate in October and November from Continental Europe and some people used to believe that because they arrived around the same time as wintering woodcock they'd travelled on the waders' backs and the tiny goldcrest became known as the 'woodcock pilot'.

Carrion Crow

17 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Carrion Crow. The crow is defined in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language as "a large black bird that feeds upon the carcasses of beasts." Crows have always suggested an element of foreboding. They are arch-scavengers and black mobs of them crowd our rubbish tips but they're also birds we admire for their intelligence and adaptability.

Short-Eared Owl

16 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Short-eared Owl. Short-eared owls, one of our most spectacular birds of prey, are nomads, roaming over vast areas of open countryside and breeding where they find their favourite habitat of moorland or long grass.

Rock Dove

15 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Rock Dove. The birds that Woody Allen once described as "rats with wings" are for many the bane of urban life. Feral pigeons, as domesticated rock doves are known, live closely alongside us. But the same species has, over millennia, been cosseted by pigeon fanciers, used to deliver wartime messages and been housed in dovecotes.

Jack Snipe

14 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Jack Snipe. The song of the Jack snipe has been likened to the sound of a distant horse cantering along a road. To hear it though, you need to visit Scandinavian bogs and mires where these small waders breed. When the ice seals their northern breeding areas jack snipes head south and west and many winter in the British Isles.

Grey Plover

11 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Grey Plover. The call of the grey plover across the shimmering mud-flats of an autumn estuary is a haunting sound. They feed out on open mudflats using the "run, stop, peck" method....a quick run towards any worms or shellfish which they spot with those big eyes, stop, then a slight lean forward to pick it up.

Brambling

10 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Brambling. Bramblings are the northern equivalent of the chaffinch and breed across huge areas of Scandinavia and Russia. In autumn they migrate south in search of seeds and are particularly fond of beech-mast. The largest recorded gathering of any living bird species in the world is of a flock of over 70 million bramblings at a roost in Switzerland in the winter of 1951.

Common Pheasant

9 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Common Pheasant. The crowing of pheasants is a sound inseparable from most of the UK countryside, yet these flamboyant birds were introduced into the UK. The pheasant's coppery plumage and red face-wattles, coupled with a tail that's as long again as its body, make the cock pheasant a strikingly beautiful bird.

Bearded Tit

8 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Bearded Tit. Bearded Tit live in reed-beds, eat mainly reed-seeds in winter and build their nests using reed leaves and flower-heads. The males do have a flamboyant black moustache which would be the envy of any Chinese mandarin.

Pink-Footed Goose

7 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Pink-Footed Goose. To see and hear a skein of pink-footed geese as they fly from their roost on coastal mudflats to feed inland is a stirring experience. In winter the British Isles hosts well over half the global population of pinkfeet.

Ortolan Bunting

4 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Ortolan Bunting. Ortolan Buntings are smart relatives of our yellowhammer. They're migrants which winter in Africa and small numbers of birds heading south for the winter may turn up on our coasts in autumn. But until recently in parts of southern Europe, their arrival was welcomed by hunters with nets.

The sound archive recording of the ortolan bunting featured in this programme was sourced from:
Volker Arnold, XC139765. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/139765.

Eider

3 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Eider. Eiders are northern sea-ducks perhaps most famous for the soft breast feathers with which they line their nests. These feathers were collected by eider farmers and used to fill pillows and traditional 'eider –downs'. Drake eiders display to the females with odd moaning calls which you can hear in the programme.

Red-legged Partridge

2 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Red-legged Partridge. The red-legged partridge, which are sometimes called French partridges, are native to Continental Europe and were successfully introduced to the UK as a game bird in the 18th century. Seen from a distance, crouching in an arable field, they look like large clods of earth, but up close they have beautiful plumage.

Redwing

1 oktober 2013 · 2 min

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Wildlife Sound Recordist, Chris Watson, presents the Redwing. The soft thin 'seep' calls of redwings as they fly over at night are as much a part of autumn as falling leaves, damp pavements and the smoke of bonfires. In winter up to a million redwings pour into our islands, most of them from Scandinavia and Iceland.

Serin

30 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the serin. Serins breed just across the English Channel but they are small finches that continue to tantalize ornithologists here in the UK. Hopes were raised that this Continental finch would settle here to breed, especially if our climate became warmer. However, something about our islands doesn't suit them. They do like large parks and gardens, so keep an ear out for the song of this visitor....a cross between a goldfinch and a goldcrest, and you may be rewarded.

Tawny Pipit

27 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the tawny pipit. Tawny pipits have never bred in the UK in real life but they have in fiction. Released in 1944 the film, 'The Tawny Pipit', featured a pair found in an English village. Their rarity causes the village to rally round to protect the birds when the field in which they are nesting is marked out for ploughing. The film leaves the audience with the message that nothing can change traditional village life.

Great Reed Warbler

26 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the great reed warbler. As you'd expect from their name, Great Reed Warblers are a much larger version of the Common Reed Warbler and breed in Continental Europe where their very loud song echoes around reed-beds, it can be heard up to half a kilometre away. We can hear one or more singing Great Reed Warblers in the UK each spring.

Melodious Warbler

25 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the melodious warbler. A lemon-yellow warbler singing on a sunny Spanish hillside will be the well-named Melodious Warbler. They are slightly smaller than blackcaps, moss-green above and pale yellow below. You may occasionally see them in the UK in late summer or autumn. The song is melodious and the bird often includes nasal chattering phrases that sound like house sparrows.

Aquatic Warbler

24 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the aquatic warbler. The stripy aquatic warbler is streaked like the sedges it lives in and is the only globally threatened European perching bird. They sing in the marshes of central and eastern Europe where the small European population has its stronghold. Unfortunately, this specialized habitat is disappearing because of drainage, disturbance and peat extraction. They are migrants so it's vital to protect their wintering areas as well as their breeding sites. It's known that up to 10,000 birds winter in the swamps of North-west Senegal. Lees meer

Bluethroat

23 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the bluethroat. This is a fine songbird and a sprightly robin-sized bird with a dazzling sapphire bib. Your best chance of seeing one is in autumn when they pass through the north or east coast on migration.

Jay

20 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the jay. This bird is a colourful member of the crow family. In September and October you'll often see jays flying around woodland with their bills and throats crammed with acorns. Many of these they bury as winter stores but not all are retrieved by Jays and many germinate and grow into young oaks, making the jay a tree-planter on a national scale.

Thrush Nightingale

19 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the thrush nightingale. Even though there's no sign of the whistling crescendos that are a hallmark of its close relative, the Nightingale, the song of the thrush nightingale is an accomplished performance. They are summer visitors to Europe and prefer dense damp thickets from which they often sing.

Turnstone

18 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the turnstone. A turnstone is a stout little wading bird which you'll often see probing under seaweed on rocky shores or flipping pebbles over with the stout bills...hence their name....Turnstone. In summer they are intricately patterned and strikingly coloured like a tortoiseshell cat but at other times of year they look brownish and can be hard to see against the seaweed covered rocks among which they love to feed.

Hobby

17 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Hobby. Sickle winged, red-trousered and black-moustached, the hobby is a strikingly beautiful falcon. Hobbies arrive in the UK in late April or May from their wintering grounds in Africa. They are now flourishing in the UK where there are now around 2000 pairs, breeding mainly on farmland and heaths in England and Wales.

Great Shearwater

16 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Great Shearwater; a wanderer of the open ocean. They breed on remote islands in the South Atlantic and then disperse widely and many follow fish and squid shoals northwards, appearing around UK coasts in late summer and early autumn. The south-west of Britain and Ireland is the best area to look for them.

Great Spotted Woodpecker

13 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Great Spotted woodpecker. In spring Great Spotted Woodpeckers drum loudly with their bills against tree bark to advertise their territories. Unlike many of our woodland birds, which are declining, Great Spotted Woodpeckers have increased rapidly over the last few decades - up to 250% since the 1970's.

Mistle Thrush: Part One

12 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Mistle Thrush. Loud rattling calls, like someone scraping a comb across wood, tell you that Mistle Thrushes are about. From midsummer to early autumn, bands of Mistle Thrushes roam the countryside, where they feed on open pastures, among stubble or on moorland. These birds are very fond of the white sticky berries of mistletoe and spread the seeds into cracks of tree bark when they wipe their bills or defecate.

Wood Sandpiper

11 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Wood Sandpiper. Wood Sandpipers are elegant waders and just a handful of pairs breed in the UK, in wooded marshes and remote bogs of Northern Scotland. There's a chance to see them when they break their migration journey south at inland pools and marshes here. Listen out for their cheerful call that has been described as sounding like an old penny-whistle.

Green Sandpiper

10 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Green Sandpiper; a bird with a wonderful yodelling call and the heart-stopping suddenness with which it leaps up from its feeding place and dashes off. The birds that visit the UK are often from Scandinavia, where they nest high up in a fir-tree. When the chicks hatch they tumble unharmed from the nest and are escorted to safe feeding places by their parents.

Meadow Pipit

9 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Meadow Pipit. The thin but penetrating calls of the meadow pipit can be heard on a remote mountainside or high above the city streets on an autumn day. Meadow pipits are often the main hosts for the parasitic Cuckoos and many a pipit pair ends up stuffing insects into a much larger cuckoo chick.

Red Grouse

6 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Red Grouse. These birds like to eat the shoots of young heather and nest in the shelter of older clumps. For many years Red Grouse were thought to be the only species of bird found in the British Isles and nowhere else, but scientists now believe the Red Grouse is a relative, a subspecies of the Willow Grouse, which is a widespread bird of northern Europe.

Greenshank

5 september 2013 · 2 min

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Brett Westwood presents the Greenshank. The ringing triple call of a greenshank from a pool or marshy area is something to listen out for and a sure sign that autumn migration is under way. It's during their migration north that most of us meet greenshanks because in the UK they breed only in Scotland and even there, they are usually in the most remote bogs and mires of the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland.