Bords of prey

There was a sparrow hawk sat on my garden fence last week. I hadn’t seen one around these parts before but a neighbour who keeps an eye out for bird life told me that they see them fairly regularly.
 


Billy Fish said:
Well I was going to ask the locals but they were driving passed me at 80mph and the ignorants beggars wouldn't treply 😄
Click to expand...
It’s really only when you meet a truck or a bus coming screaming round a blind hairpin on a mountain track just after narrowly avoiding hitting some cows nonchalantly sauntering through an unlit tunnel, then dodging the peppers falling off the back of the tractor that you start to appreciate being stuck in the roadworks on the M42.
 
We look out onto a wheat field then down onto the Atlantic in Brittany and often see Marsh Harriers patrolling over the etangs, lagoons surrounded by dense reed beds teeming with frogs and all kinds of aquatic creatures.

Just been here a couple of days but it seems like one of the Marshies has adopted our field as it’s new gaff. Seen it loads of times perched on the posts in the field opposite and now they’ve just cut the wheat, flapping up & down at low height looking for mice & voles before settling on those shredded wheat bales.

A huge and impressive creature and it’s a real privilege to spend quality time looking at it through the binoculars rather than the usual fleeting glimpses here and there.
 
This reminds me of the Cockney Parrot joke, delivered expertly (verging on perfection) by some cockney twat in a red shirt. If I knew how to upload videos I would but its’s still one of the funniest things I’ve ever been sent.

EDIT:

 
Last edited:
1. The white tailed eagles that they introduced on the Isle of Wight when I was volunteering down in Hampshire. They are tagged so can be tracked, and have been roaming all over the country, roosting overnight before flying back to the island. One of them made an early "sightseeing" roundtrip up to London, around the Downing St. area then back.
2. The Sparrowhawk that used to sit on one of our security floodlights, under the eaves, watching for prey then swooping low over the garden. I could swear that it set the lights off on purpose!
3. The buzzards, sometimes as many as five just soaring around in the sky on a lovely sunny day. Though here in Yorkshire there seems to be a healthy population of Red Kites.
 
Wow! We were in raptor heaven this afternoon. The farmer was running the plough over the wheat stubble he cut the other week and in one small field right in front of our house we had the marsh harrier, a buzzard and two kestrels all going mad as the plough presumably unearthed all manner of critters nested up in the straw.

The buzzard was mewing the whole time and the sunlight catching the marsh harrier as it swooped low over the fields hopping from bale to bale was just a beautiful sight.

Talk about lucky.
 

Back
Top