Author: Anne Fox

Oh dear! It’s been a long while since anything was added here. One of the reasons is that we have had two sets of visitors in quick sucession and Anne has been away to two conferences in Copenhagen. First came Mum and Dad who experienced the luxury of the Helnan Hotel in Grenaa and then came Nick, Jan, Katie and Adam who brought Madness to the house.

We managed to pack a lot in during the three days they were here. Sommerland, Fregatten Jylland, Glass Museum and Scandinavian Animal Park which had all changed substantially since the last time we Foxes had visited. There was also lots of Nintendo playing of both the passive and active kind.

Tony is in Iceland at the moment but when he returned from Russia he brought back a couple of hard-boiled eggs. Not any old hard-boiled eggs, but beautifully decorated ones as in the photo. What do you do with them? It’s rather destructive and you can see it on the newsletter page (no link given, you’ll have to remember it!) and play the video at the top of the video list.

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What on earth took Tony to Vladivostock and the Far East of Russia?
The Chinese or Scaly-sided Merganser is a large fish-eating duck which breeds along rivers in ancient forests in Far Eastern Russia, North Korea and north-east China. Their wintering area remains largely unknown, but they have been seen widely dispersed on freshwaters in China in winter, with the majority known from the lower Yangtze River, although there are also reports of small numbers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, northern Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand. It a very striking waterbird, both sexes have shaggy crests and scaled flanks. The adult male has a blackish-green glossy head and neck with a long crest, orange-cream breast and underparts, and dark patterned mantle, while the female has a brownish head and more wispy crest. The species is endangered, numbering less than 4,500 individuals after declines in the 1960s and 1970s due to logging in primary forests along major rivers, but the species is also threatened currently by illegal hunting, entanglement in fishing nets and river pollution.

One of the problems facing the population is an apparent shortage of males. On the breeding grounds, it is common to see single males with 2 females and females paired to young males that have yet to assume full adult plumage. Hence, in contrast to the vast majority of duck species (where males typically outnumber females), it would appear that the boys have a tougher time than the girls for reasons we do not understand.Like most mergansers, the males desert the females early in the breeding season, moving away from the breeding areas to a safe place where they become flightless and replace their wing feathers ready for the coming year. The females do this on the freshwater breeding areas whilst raising their ducklings, but we have no idea where the males go for this function.It may be that whatever is affecting male survival to skew the sex ratio, is operating on their moulting grounds, so it is important to find out where this occurs and whether it is illegal hunting, entanglement in fishing gear or some other factor (such as pollution) that is hitting the males so hard.

Females can be caught in summer at their nest cavities and in artificial nest tubes provided for them under a project funded via the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust in the UK to Dr Diana Solovieva, a Russian waterfowl biologist who studies the species in the Russian Far East.Males have proved almost impossible to catch, so it was this challenge that took Tony to the Russian Far East in March 2007.Their technique was to stretch strong but fine nets (about 21 m long and 3 m high) across the breeding rivers to try and catch the mergansers as they fly up and down.Because of illegal local shooting the birds tend to fly high most the time, but in the end 3 weeks effort caught 4 mergansers, 2 males and 2 females. Wing feather samples were taken from all the birds to compare with those taken in previous years which have been analysed chemically to show whether they were grown in freshwater or saltwater. The females (as expected) grow their feathers in freshwater, but it appears that the males may do so in saltwater, so this has provided us with vital evidence that we need to search for the secretive males in marine waters during their post breeding moult period. Diana is already preparing a project proposal to search for these elusive moulting areas next year.

The trip was great fun, and in one memorable day off we made a visit to the coast to see 3 Steller’s Sea Eagles, 20 White-tailed Eagles and a host of rare and unusual ducks.It sounds rather mad to travel half way around the world for 3 weeks only to catch 4 ducks (although we saw one other bounce out of the net, one female escaped before could catch her and at least two more punched big holes through our nets!). However, this is a very rare species, they rarely fly low over the water in a manner that makes them easy to catch and they are very difficult to capture under any circumstances, so we were very satisfied with the result.It was also great fun to catch mandarin ducks in the wild as well. Tony was too worried about losing the first bird they caught during extraction from the net to enjoy the first one, but there was a very silly grin on his face for many days afterwards.He was a little disappointed not to at least see tiger tracks in the forest (yes, they occur there too!), but the privilege of being in ancient wild wood that extends over such a vast area was deeply inspiring. He was very impressed by the kindness and warm hospitality of the many Russians he visited and stayed with during the trip and it is this that will linger longest in his memories of the trip.

Click on the photo to see it larger. Tony will comment on the content later. The photo is derived from Google Earth. Fancy being able to zoom in onto the exact outside privy which he was using every day!

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This is a photo slide show of our meeting in the Czech Republic a few weeks ago. Just to show that I do go away to work!

Welcome to the wonderful world of virtual reality! Mia has just been introduced to the virtual world of Club Penguin (no, not Second Life – that’s where her mother goes). But sometimes it is really difficult to find your way round these virtual worlds so you just have to phone your friend and spend 15 minutes going through the ‘Higher! Higher! No lower’ Golden Shot routine before you can find each other. Club Penguin is apparantly 100% safe for children.

Meanwhile somewhere west of Vladivostok:

Thought I’d take a picture of a willow by our pond before the vegetation overwhelms everything. Water levels still high.

So here it is! Photographic evidence just to reassure visitors that we now only have one old banger. A couple of weeks ago we purchased an old new car or a new old car. It is a classic one lady driver with very low mileage (you can’t say kilometrage can you?). We even have all the service documentation to prove it. Even though it dates from 2003 it is very hi-tech for us. The salesman, who is also our regular car mechanic, was very keen to point out the bottom warmers and keeps switching them on at every opportunity. I’m not used to being beeped at so much and there are warning signals which I don’t even recognise.

I wasn’t going to take it to Billund airport when I went to Germany last week as I thought it was a shame if it was going to stand idle while Tony and the girls needed a car. However it was a very good decision to take the new car as the old Suzuki’s radiator gave up the day I left and I would never have caught my plane if I had taken it.

The picture shows Tony examining mammouth bones in St Petersburg. He left for Russia early this morning and is staying with his Russian colleague whose husband is a world expert on these creatures. Tomorrow they will be flying to eastern Russia where the Chinese are taking over and where Tony and his group will be studying and catching scaly sided mergansers.

In between the Czech Republic and this trip I managed to fit in a quick trip to Frankfurt and was very relieved to return home on Sunday in time for Tony to leave again today.

Try finding Krnov on the map of the Czech Republic. One of my Danish colleagues bought a road map of the Czech Republic and Krnov, the town where we stayed, was not on it. We think he should get a refund. Krnov was near to the Polish border in the extreme east of the country. and our hosts told us that they have glimpsed wolves and lynx in the woods or should that be forest? We stayed at the hotel Cvilin.

On the last day we went to Prague which is amazingly beautiful but astonishingly crowded even in mid-March. Unfortunately our Czech friends were away so I couldn’t meet up with them.