Tag Archive | buzzard

A pterodactyl over my house

Since Chap and I moved to our cottage 22 years ago, we have kept a nature diary. We record what’s going on in the garden, what wildlife we have seen, what the weather is doing, and general impressions of the natural world about us. We have a bird species list, where we note ‘new’ birds when we see them in or over our garden.

Yesterday morning I was chatting to Chap on the phone, looking out of the study window as I always do when I’m on the blower (my desk faces a wall so it’s nice to see the world …!), when I had a wonderful, chance surprise. A heron was flying towards our cottage, not very high at all and coming right at us. It is the first time I have ever seen a heron here (though there are some on the nearby streams and rivers and lakes). I squealed down the phone at Chap and near-deafened him, I think.

Grey heron (Ardea cinerea). Photo by Kclama.

Grey heron (Ardea cinerea). Photo by Kclama.

It flew right over me and I had a great view of its belly as it passed. Beautiful.

Herons (Ardea cinereaare such wonderful birds. We sometimes see them standing stock still in the local shallow chalk streams, poised and ready to strike, or walking with that slow, high-stepping tread through the water. They are a beautiful cloudy-sky grey. But it is when they are flying that they intrigue me most, and remind me of nothing more than the illustrations of flying pterodactyls in my dinosaur books from my childhood. Watching a heron fly you can quite easily believe that birds are feathery dinosaurs … Their heads are pulled back, their legs trail behind them and they beat their enormous wings with slow, steady flaps.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Paweł Kuźniar.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Paweł Kuźniar.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Mediamenta.

Grey heron in flight. Photo by Mediamenta.

Their wingspan is among the largest of British birds, at between 155 and 195 cm for an adult bird.

(I know their proper title is Grey heron, but they are just ‘herons’ here as we don’t have any other type here in the UKand they are, after all, the original bird to be called a heron).

Not a grey heron. Drawing by Matthew P. Martyniuk.

Not a heron. Drawing by Matthew P. Martyniuk.

Such an exciting day. But I think of all our heron sightings, the top one still has to be the day we saw a buzzard (Buteo buteo) and a heron having an aerial dogfight. We used to live in the Woodford Valley north of Salisbury, and were driving close to Lake House when we saw a tussle going on in the sky, just above the trees by the road. The two birds were circling round and round each other and occasionally clashing, and as they are both large birds it was quite a spectacle. We couldn’t quite make out what was going on, but we wondered if the buzzard was harrying the heron to make it regurgitate its catch.

PS. Our lone fieldfare is still with us, 36 days+ and counting. We had some snow the other daynot deep, but enough to remind him of home.

UPDATE Saturday 6 May 2017: This morning we had only our second ever sighting of a heron from our house in the near-twenty five years that we have lived here. And what a close encounter it was: it flew its slow flapping flight very low over our neighbours’ garden, and to our amazement landed in a very ungainly fashion on an overhead line just above the garden. It stayed perched there for about a minute or so before flying off. I hurried to look at our garden to see if it was heading for our pond, but sadly no – although I should be grateful that the tadpoles and newts and frogs live to see another day. Seeing such a massive bird perched on a wire was quite a thing.

Raptors in and around our village

The night before last I was awake between 3 and 5 am (I know that much as I heard the village church clock strike 3, then 4, then 5 … Oh the joys of insomnia!) and just before 4 am a tawny owl (Strix aluco) perched up very close to our cottage and started its call.

Tawny owl (Strix aluco). Photo by Martin Mecnarowski.

Tawny owl (Strix aluco). Photo by Martin Mecnarowski.

As it has been so hot recently all our windows are wide open, so it sounded like it was almost on top of us: I think it might have been in our neighbour’s alder tree. Anyhow, after a few initial single screechy ‘ooh-eee’ calls (can’t think how to describe them better), it started up with its regular ‘Hoo hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo’ call, the one that we in the UK often call ‘twit-twooo’. (This BBC video starts with the ‘twit-twoo’ and ends up with a screechy one, if you were curious to know what my pathetic attempts at owl call transcription actually sound like).

Within a couple of minutes a second, distant tawny owl was responding, setting up a nice duet. And then a third joined in, somewhere between the other two—not as loud as the first but louder than the second. And he sounded like he had a bad case of sore throat: his croaky calls didn’t add much to the melody. The three of them sang to each other (or more realistically, disputed territories vocally) for about ten minutes, and then, as abruptly as it had started, it stopped. I still didn’t get to sleep though.

Tawny owl chicks. Photo by Artur Mikołajewski.

Tawny owl chicks. Cute overload! Photo by Artur Mikołajewski.

I have a real fascination for raptors of all kinds. We are lucky to have various kinds living in and flying over our village. We frequently see buzzards (Buteo buteo) and occasionally sparrowhawks (Accipiter nisus) flying over—the sparrowhawks hunt quite low over our garden and I have had some amazingly close encounters.

Buzzard (common buzzard, Buteo buteo). Photo by Arend.

Buzzard (common buzzard, Buteo buteo). Photo by Arend.

Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) in flight, seen from underneath. Photo by Christian Knoch.

Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) in flight, seen from underneath. Photo by Christian Knoch.

Most exciting of all are the red kites (Milvus milvus) that we have started seeing in the last four years or so.

Red kite (Milvus milvus). This stunning bird has a two metre wingspan. Photo by Thomas Kraft.

These magnificent birds used to be common in the UK—so common that they used to scavenge for scraps on the street of medieval London—but were so relentlessly persecuted over the centuries that their numbers dwindled to a handful of breeding birds in mid Wales by early 1900s. Reintroductions using European birds started in Wales and a little later in the Chiltern Hills in the UK, followed by other projects around the country, and these have been a great success: the red kite population is increasing and their distribution across the UK is spreading.

We waited and waited for our first sighting round these parts. A friend told us he had seen one in Dorset. Then in February 2006 great excitement when Chap saw one circling over an ‘A’ road about three miles from here. But the day were were hoping for—seeing a red kite over our own village here in south-west Wiltshire—finally came on 19 April 2010. That was a red letter day indeed for our nature diary. Since then we have seen them regularly—so regularly in fact that we hope they are breeding nearby, rather than just passing through.

We once were lucky enough to see a kite and a buzzard flying in the same thermal, and we were able to compare sizes: the buzzard is a big bird, but next to the kite it was dwarfed.

Welsh Kite Trust website

Royal Society for the Protection of Bird (RSPB) website

British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) website