BTO News Autumn 2025, Issue 356
I am glad the gulls on the cover are identified inside or I wouldn’t have a clue – they are Herring Gulls.
This is an exceptional issue of the magazine from the British Trust for Ornithology. Right away there’s a link to the Cuckoo tracking site, Cuckoo Tracking Project | BTO. There’s a very cool and up to date map showing the birds’ progress into Africa, with each named bird having an individual page with a photo, status, tagging date, age, place and number, and even wing length. Jim, we learn, spent some time in France – almost three weeks in Montpellier – before carrying on to Algeria, Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso, Benin and now Nigeria.
I learnt about the East of England Curlew Recovery project directly from Nick Acheson during my Norfolk trip last year. Nests on airfields would be destroyed but instead the eggs are taken, hatched in incubators and the chicks released at around 50 days old. Nick’s excitement when we saw one of ‘his’ birds was infectious.
The BTO Acoustic Pipeline is being used “to classify Nightjar calls and infer their behaviour” whilst the swan census carried out every six years will take place again in 2026.
CEO Juliet Vickery writes about research papers which it is hoped will help with avian flu (HPAI), finch trichomonosis and the Usutu virus.
There’s a good letter from Mary Matthews explaining that in spite of the wonders of the What3Words app, mountain rescue teams prefer grid references: they are in a logical order, are not dependent on electronic devices and words can easily be misheard over the phone. Another letter refers to an earlier article about female birds, noting that in field guides even their size can be under-reported.
Another of animator Will Rose’s delightful works illustrates a piece by Mark Ereira-Guyer about connecting with nature, the digital cocoon so many of us now live in and the importance of inclusiveness when it comes to conservation.
Santiago Cárdenas was an excellent speaker at last year’s BTO conference and here he celebrates 30 years of Garden BirdWatch. Gardens, he says, “should not be understood as our private, curated squares of tamed nature. Rather, gardens are the space we share with nature.” How we look after our gardens affects which species visit – in the case of Blackcaps, feeding stations have “driven the micro-evolution of new migratory behaviour in this species.”
Madeleine Barton and Greg Conway write about nest predation, utilising research data from nest cameras. ‘Management’ of predators is likely to be controversial and no one wants to act in that way needlessly. Much-maligned Grey Squirrels and Magpies were not significant. Jays and raptors, amongst others, were. Wader nests were mostly predated by mammals, including foxes, badgers, hedgehogs and … sheep. Cats and dogs are problematic too of course but were not covered in this survey since the camera sites did not include urban or farmland settings.
It’s commonly believed that birds do not have or only have a minimal sense of smell, a myth which may have originated in the 1820s, although it was accepted that Turkey Vultures used smell to find carrion. Audubon however seemed to show otherwise, although his experiments were flawed, and that belief has persisted to the present day. It would be very odd, really, if birds couldn’t smell.
Audubon was not solely to blame. Many birds have small olfactory apparatus and of course they do not tend to look as though they are sniffing. Later experiments have shown songbirds to have a sense of smell comparable to that of rats.
Birds use smell in a number of ways that we know about, one of which is to find food. Seabirds can detect relevant smells from miles away and storks, for example, know that the smell of freshly mown grass means there will be a feast for them – disturbed snails, frogs and small rodents. It is also now clear that homing pigeons rely in part on an olfactory map for navigation and burrowing birds use it to find their nests. Smell is also useful for avoidance of predators and the identification of family and even choosing mates and perhaps strengthening pair bonds.
As for the scents of birds themselves, that mostly comes from preen oil – but there is still much we don’t know.
AI Reggae
I have written quite extensively about my deep love of reggae music. I don’t think it is too boastful to say that I know a lot about it and that from my favourite period, roots reggae from the 1970s and 80s, there cannot be many artists and even tracks I don’t know. The Spotify algorithm’s weekly Release Radar provides me almost entirely with new reggae or new versions of old songs. The other week a track caught my ear: ‘Rasta Spirit’ by Elijah Roots from the unreleased album Babylon Must Fall or, confusingly, From Babylon to Zion. I liked it a lot and as I usually do when that happens looked to see if the entire album was available, which I then downloaded. But something which I absolutely cannot put my finger on didn’t feel quite right. My suspicions grew stronger when I listened to the entire album. Ironically, a major giveaway were some very badly done fake vinyl scratches. And anyway, how had I not heard of Elijah Roots (a perfectly plausible name for a reggae singer) and why did nothing sound quite authentic?
There is a good deal more of Elijah Roots music out there. Googling him in this post-truth era was rather disturbing. “Is Elijah Roots AI?”, I asked. No, was the first definitive answer. I read that he was a well-known Jamaican visionary in his day and that these were lost treasures from the roots reggae era. The album I had downloaded was plainly (and outrageously) dated 1972. Youtube commenters shared my doubts, one citing AI as the very worst Babylon had yet brought upon the world. Eventually I was able to confirm that the entire thing is fake – Elijah Roots never existed. It’s pretty shocking and it’s pretty convincing, but AI is not quite there yet. It could be seen as a tribute to roots reggae and if the music is any good, does it matter? To me it very much does. I don’t see it as a tribute, I see it as disrespectful to the pioneers, especially those who sang from the heart and a profound belief in Rastafarianism. The promotion was manifestly dishonest. I felt a bit gullible to be honest, but if it nearly fooled me I worry that it will completely fool others.
I never use AI to write – that is my craft and I couldn’t begin to see the point of doing so. The only time I use AI, apart from for research where it is sometimes better than the usual search engines, is to remove unwanted objects or people, very occasionally, from photographs. It is very good at that indeed. In a recent interview Stephen King said that he didn’t think AI would ever be able to write a novel like a human, although he went on to rather contradict himself. AI is not, yet at any rate, very good at cryptic crosswords. It is hard to imagine it understanding every nuance of the written word. Art and music though? I begin to wonder. Perhaps this is way too simplistic (and old-fashioned), but for me, AI art of any kind is essentially worthless because it isn’t real. I have seen any number of lengths of wildlife footage which are very obviously fake, but I also know people who have been taken in by them. What is in the creators’ heads I cannot imagine, what is their purpose? Like the internet though, AI is here to stay and we cannot turn it off. Fake news is surely responsible in part for the horrible flag-raising and waving going on here at the moment but that really is down to the distraction focus on illegal immigration as the source of all our woes as propounded by Farage, Starmer and the like and now further inflamed by Kemi Badenoch. We are on a precipice it seems to me and if we fall, fascism is at the bottom.
Radioactive Rhinos
I did actually wonder if this story, the Rhisotope Project in South Africa, was fake news, it seemed so outlandish. The latest technique employed in the war on rhino poaching is to drill a small hole in the horn of a rhino and inject a mildly radioactive substance, said to be harmless. I seem to remember at one time people were painting the horns pink. The point is that radiation will trigger alerts at borders such that the horns cannot be exported. If this what needs to be done, if this is the only way, then so be it, but what a sad and terrible indictment of our species it is.
Andy Goldsworthy
I have often thought about buying a book of the work of Richard Long whose art I love – I have done this now and will come to it. Amazon’s clever algorithm meanwhile led me to this, Andy Goldsworthy, Fifty Years, National Galleries of Scotland, 2025, published to accompany an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. The text mostly takes the form of one excellent, long interview with the artist. The book is lavishly illustrated and his work is … I do not have the words. But it blows me away. It stirs the heart and soul and mind, and haunts. From the back cover: “Working with materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves snow and ice, he has … created a unique body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land.” And much else besides I would add. A lot of it is ephemeral, by design. Perhaps that is partly the point, that the work really can’t be described in words. I wish I could show more than just the cover of the book here (at the head of this post) but I do recommend this book, a visit to the exhibition (I wish) or even just looking online: Andy Goldsworthy | Fifty Years | National Galleries of Scotland. I feel inspired, ridiculously perhaps, to get down to the garden centre, buy some rocks and make a little cairn.
I suppose I already have certain arrangements in the garden such as the placing of lengths of deadwood in an other than random manner (not that Goldsworthy does not celebrate the random too), or deliberately allowing this lion (the guardian of the garden), made from recycled metal, to be partly hidden (one friend sniggeringly found this amusing and incomprehensible, another the other day saw what I was doing exactly), which spring from the same part of human nature. But Goldsworthy’s vision and the sheer bloody hard work his creations demand … he is a giant.
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