NocMig: birding by night
At this time, whilst we are unable to travel except for essential workers en-route to work, or for food, medication etc, there is naturally an increased interest in what can be done from home. For many that can include listening at night for the calls of birds flying over whilst on Nocturnal Migration, or NocMig as it is abbreviated. This can be done with, or without the help of electronics, but just as a camera enables a record to be kept of sightings and allows id to be confirmed, so do audio recordings of what you hear, and at night this is normally the only way to document records.
Even if you don’t currently have a microphone and recorder, remember that your phone can be used successfully to record many of the more strident and obvious calls. The background (ambient) noise that comes from road traffic, trains, factories, aircraft etc is currently much diminished so there may have never been a better time in recent decades to turn off the TV, put on an extra jumper (or two) and open the window, or step onto the doorstep.
In the last few evenings a huge nocturnal movement of Common Scoter has taken place across England. It has has brought birders out of their daytime lockdown and into their gardens at night in the hope of hearing or recording birds passing overhead.
So to whet your NocMig appetite a number of birders have shared their experiences which you bring you here
Chris Batty – RBA Newsteam
Since 2012 I have undertaken autonomous recording of bird sounds in the garden of my house in Knott End-on-Sea, Lancashire, using just a basic solid state digital sound recorder; a Sony PCM-M10 (although this model is now discontinued) with a Dead Kitten windshield and held upright with an old shoe. Such speculative recording at night has been frequent practice by birders in the USA for many years - for example see Bill Evans' where I found my inspiration - and has recently become popular in western Europe and popularised by The Sound Approach in their books - especially Catching the Bug and latterly online. From 2016 I increased my efforts and since then I have recorded on calm nights for a total of around 900 hours each year; predominately during spring and autumn but occasionally in summer too.
So far during the hours of darkness I have recorded calls from a total of 76 species including 11 species of wildfowl and 23 waders but just 22 species of passerine. Several friends have helped me identify some of the calls unfamiliar to me, as have the helpful users of xeno-canto where I have uploaded several mystery recordings, although my 'nocmig unknowns' folder still holds 240 cuts which in the future I will revisit and hope to resolve at least some myself.
As I live by the shore of Morecambe Bay, several species that are sought after by most nocmig enthusiasts are ubiquitous here; for example Pink-footed Goose, Shelduck, Oystercatcher and Redshank, and less frequently Little Egret, Sandwich, Common and Arctic Tern.
The presence of a proximal Rookery and a gull roost is a mixed blessing bringing the occasional Mediterranean Gull but making Bittern (recorded once) and Common Scoter (regular in both spring and autumn) more difficult to detect when searching sonograms of sound files visually as these species have similar low-pitched calls and resultant 'signatures'. Along with Common Scoter, Wigeon, Teal and Whooper Swan are frequent night migrants but I have only logged Pintail and Gadwall once each. In early summer feral Canada and Greylag Geese can pass over at night presumably en-route to their moulting grounds in the Lake District.
Although it isn't always easy to interpret the significance of nocmig data, I suspect the regular passes by Moorhen, Coot and Little Grebe - and perhaps Water Rail - will be territorial local birds and not true migrants, but the single Baillon's Crake will clearly have come further.
Similarly my location makes it likely that the waders I am recording are moving more in response to the rising tide than the changing seasons although Whimbrel are clearly migrating as are Common Sandpipers and Little Ringed Plovers, along with the occasional Avocet, Spotted Redshank, Green Sandpiper, and one each of both Dotterel and Pectoral Sandpiper.
Of the passerines it is the thrushes that predominate nocmig with - in order of abundance - Redwing, Song Thrush, Blackbird, Fieldfare and Ring Ouzel, but as yet no Mistle Thrush. Otherwise, Skylark is the next most abundant passerine migrant at night, and the flight calls of Robin are regular although they don't appear to correlate with the expected periods of migration.
Meadow Pipit, far and away the commonest diurnal migrant locally, doesn't typically migrate at night with just two instances logged here but Tree Pipit does and especially so in autumn with seven out of ten recorded Tree Pipits passing at that season doing so at night compared to just one in fifty at night during spring. I have logged Pied/White Wagtail, Sand Martin and Chiffchaff all just once during nocmig.
Finches and buntings are rare with just a few Brambling and Reed Buntings and most of those typically in the minutes before dawn, whilst Chaffinch, Hawfinch and Yellowhammer have all been logged only once.
Although not strictly nocmig, some passerines occasionally sing at night - albeit briefly - usually Dunnock but also Blackcap and Lesser Whitethroat on occasion. Those quintessential night birds the owls have been limited to regular Barn and Tawny (and often a captive Eagle Owl).
Looking to the future there are a further 119 species that I have seen, heard or recorded from my house that I have yet to record during nocmig (although I have sound-recordings of 56 of these from daylight hours), of which Barnacle and White-fronted Goose, Shoveler, Tufted Duck, Curlew Sandpiper, Spotted Flycatcher and Yellow Wagtail seem the most likely nocmig additions, but what I am really hoping for is the first British nocmig Black-winged Stilt.
David Campbell – RBA Newsteam
“I use an Olympus LS-100 Portable Recorder with its inbuilt microphones, along with a wind buffer for recording both at day and night. It weighs less than 300g and is fairly small. When I'm doing any kind of purposeful birding, even if only in the garden, I have the recorder running just in case something interesting calls as it flies over. Whilst I do like writing descriptions for birds I find, that does not extend to fly-over passerines, as attempting to describe their calls in a meaningful and original way feels futile to me. Therefore, knowing that the recorder will have picked it up is hugely reassuring. It's about as good as my ears and proved its worth to me when I first tried it during my brief stint at Dungeness Bird Observatory, picking up Marsh Frogs half a mile from the windowsill I left it on. So far, this method saved me effort with a Red-throated Pipit which flew over me on Scilly, and a Serin over my garden at the start of this year's lockdown, and left me with clips as a momento of each.
My LS-100's battery doesn't quite last a full morning and it's not possible to easily carry and change a spare, so my solution is to use an Energiser power pack. This is really intended for mobile phones but connecting it via USB cable gives the LS-100 over 24 hours of power. This means I can leave my recorder out at night for nocmig and, in normal times, I will pick it up as I jump on the bike for a full day's birding. I only turn it off when I get home, then analyse my nocmig recording with Audacity software and pick out any interesting daytime recordings. The latter are by no means always scarce birds: often, if anything from a Blackbird to a Marsh Tit or Lesser Spotted Woodpecker has given a good performance near me, I then stop the recorder so I can easily locate the sound later on. As for nocmig, I leave the recorder and power pack in a bucket as far away from the noisy garden pond as possible, covered by a single layer of clingfilm, just in case it rains. I'm still finding my way with this dark art and have racked up a relatively small number of recording hours, but my highlights include a clear recording of two Wood Sandpipers over my garden in August 2018 and some 1,250 Redwing calls on one night in March this year. I've also recorded expected species such as Common Sandpiper, Sandwich Tern, Dunlin and Oystercatcher. I'm still very much in my early days of nocmig but being only a couple of streets back from the shore of the English Channel could be a huge advantage, or could it be a case of so near but so far, with most birds migrating just out of mic-shot along the beach and over the sea? Time will tell.
Ben Lewis – RSPB Warden Strumpshaw Few
I have been dabbling with the dark art of ‘Nocmig’ for two years now and have created my own set up at minimal cost (see pictured) it consists of a Tupperware box (waterproof) with a rugged outdoor microphone attached to the top, a second hand digital recorder plugged into a portable phone charger, topped off with a yoghurt pot around the mic to minimise lateral/wind noise all costing less than £50.
Similar to opening a moth trap in the morning, there is always the excitement of finding out what has been migrating over the garden while you’ve been sleeping. Its also the only time you’ll hear birders get excited about coots! In the past few nights I have recorded; 2 flocks of Common Scoter, Wigeon + Teal flocks, Bittern booming, Water Rail, Dunlin, Curlew, Great Crested Grebe, Barn Owl pretty much over the microphone as well as redwings and other unidentifiable pips and peeps flying over Brundall. Interestingly it seems easier to go through the recordings from urban areas as there are less calls, I have recorded at Strumpshaw Fen a few times now, but the ducks and geese don’t have a quiet period all night! Yes, you can’t exactly count what is heard through a microphone, but it does give a good indication of when you should sit out in your garden to catch the next inland common scoter flock, for a rather special garden tick!
If you are already nocmigging please send us your experiences and we will add them to this article.
4 April 2020
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