- Moving to the country - the deal clincher
- Lodgers
- A sad ending
- An unusual looking ferret
- Hopes for a better summer
- Kitchen sink drama
- An overseas visitor
- A wake-up call
- Humour
- At last!
- Brief encounters
- Red in tooth and claw
- Survival
- The eagle has landed
- Empty nest syndrome
- Expert fisherman
- Nesting
- Death
- High hopes
- Soap opera or Greek tragedy
- An interesting December
- Taking the Mick
- Spring - at last!
- A disabled shrew
- Winter 2014
- A final post
Monday 6 October 2014
Contents
Sunday 5 October 2014
1. Moving to the country - the deal clincher
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Who
would have thought that the ‘deal clincher’ in our house purchase would be a
bird? The decision to move into the country had been taken quite quickly once
we realised that we were spending just about every weekend out of town. If I
wasn’t engaged in solitary bird watching trips, we were both in the car
exploring quiet country roads between the Lincolnshire Wolds and the coast, or
parking the car and taking a walk.
We
had set ourselves a budget and, several viewings later, fell in love with a
Victorian farmhouse just 5 miles out of town that had been almost totally
re-built 18 years earlier - and was roughly 50% over our budget. But on a cold
and windy October morning, during endless surveys, searches and frustration,
any doubts I may have had about the house were quickly dispelled.
I’d
set off early on my bike to see if I could locate the osprey that had been
reported in the general area of the house we were considering buying. Ospreys
are not a common sight in Lincolnshire, although they may pass through on their
spring and autumn migration, and I’d never been lucky enough to see one. I
searched a couple of square miles without luck, but then suddenly, coming to
the end of a short farm track, I caught sight of a large bird about half a mile
away on top of an electricity pole. I raised my binoculars and confirmed that
it was indeed the osprey, but my first ever sighting of this hugely impressive
bird was nothing compared to the excitement I felt when I realised where it was
perched – the pole was right outside the front of what was now most definitely
‘our’ house. We moved in eight weeks later, in December 2000.
The
osprey stuck around for about two weeks, and for much of that time it was
closely observed as it went about its daily routine, sometimes by as many as
thirty birdwatchers armed with an impressive array of optical equipment. It
obliged by repeatedly swooping on the river that ran alongside the road, and
snatching fish from just beneath the surface. I saw it a couple of times more
before it left to continue what was probably a 4000 mile flight to West Africa
for the winter. I wondered if it would return next year when we’d settled in.
Please
don’t misunderstand. I’m not obsessed with birds. I’m what Simon Barnes calls a
‘bad birdwatcher’, someone constantly observing the natural world, aware of
what joy and excitement a chance observation can bring, but lacking the
messianic zeal of a ‘twitcher.’ Although birds don’t dominate my life, I think
I’d be lost without them. I’ve been fascinated by them virtually all of my
life, learning to identify 50 of them using a set of Brooke Bond ‘Bird
Portraits’ cards collected from packets of PG Tips tea in the 1950s.
I
have never been on a bird watching holiday, I don’t belong to a club, and I
don’t own a pager. If I see a large group of birdwatchers, armed with
telescopes and telephoto lenses, my curiosity will be stirred, but I’ll often wander
off in the opposite direction, preferring solitude, and an often fruitless
search for something spectacular of my own, to the certainty of catching sight
of a rarity.
I have seen some spectacular sights though, but not necessarily spectacular from a serious twitcher’s point of view, and I haven’t seen many rare visitors to the British Isles. There are still many resident British birds I have never seen either, but the act of looking for them has brought immense pleasure, and some thrilling experiences. Some of the most spectacular of these followed our move into the country, and for some of them I didn’t even have to leave the house!
Saturday 4 October 2014
2. Lodgers
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It was the ‘other-worldly’ screeches that
alerted me one April morning to the presence of something strange in the garage
of our new home. An owl box had been fitted many years earlier, and barn owls
were a regular sight, hunting along nearby ditches and verges, but so far all
that had shown any interest in the nest box were a couple of amorous wood
pigeons and a grey squirrel looking for somewhere to hide his hazel nuts.
From the entrance to the garage it was possible to
see the opening on the inner end of the box, and I was sure that that was the
source of the sounds. The box had another opening in the gable of the back wall
of the garage but, as we eventually discovered, the openings were to two
separate compartments, two sort of owl ‘semis’. I decided to investigate
further after work that evening.
Once the pots were out of the way after our evening
meal, I went into the garden and listened to the usual bird sounds. There were
collared doves, a wood pigeon, and a robin, and then that screeching again,
repeated every 15 seconds or so. It sound like some poor creature in agony. I
approached the garage, not sure what I would find, and looked up into the
darkness of the rafters. Something moved in the darkness.
I ran into the house to get a torch and my
binoculars, and this time I approached the garage with the stealth of a hunter.
I shone the torch up to the opening of the owl box, and there, staring down at
me, were two faces. They were pale, heart-shaped faces with large, startled
eyes, unmistakably young barn owls! They withdrew into the depths of the box,
but over the next hour or so, curiosity, and probably hunger, got the better of
them, and they appeared several times more. Sometimes they rocked from side to
side, and sometimes just stared vacantly into my torch beam.
The next few weeks provided numerous opportunities
for owl watching, with any visitors to the house tiptoeing to the garage to try
to catch a glimpse of the comical faces peering out of the box. By far the most
exciting views, at any time of the day, were of the parents searching the
ditches and field margins for voles, the barn owls main food. A slow, almost
languid flight, low over the rough grass, followed by the inevitable brief
hover and drop, would signal the start of the dutiful parents’ return with
another meal, both of them contributing equally to the task.
Sitting on a garden chair, trying not to be
noticed, I would watch through my binoculars as one or other of them approached
low over the ripening wheat, the prey now clearly visible in their talons. When
they were so close I had no need of binoculars, I would watch as they flew
past, just a few metres from my chair, following a regular flight path through
a gap in the line of poplar trees and into the hole in the brickwork of the
garage wall. From there, I learnt later, they would perch on one of the beams
for a few seconds, before taking the offering into the box through the opening
in which I had first observed the youngsters.
It was all over by the beginning of June, and working full time meant that I missed some of the most exciting episodes – the fledging, the practice flights, and the feeding of the young in the open. We were able to witness all of this the following summer though, but our owl neighbours were not done with 2001. The screeching started again in July, despite the atrocious weather, but this time there was to be no happy ending.
Friday 3 October 2014
3. A sad ending
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An owl
shouldn’t do that – not a wild barn owl! It was a sunny afternoon in
mid-September, and the fully fledged youngster landed just 2 metres away from
me as I was tidying up the river bank in front of the house, a tricky job at
the best of times. I guessed it was one of the second brood that had
been raised in our owl box, against all the odds given the poor summer we’d
had.
I’d taken
a keen interest in the development of this young family, and they’d provided
considerable entertainment at a barbecue in early August. Family and friends
had taken turns to visit the shed to view their antics on a TV I’d connected to
a nest box camera in the garage. It had not been good owl watching weather in
the open though, and as I was now back at work I’d seen very little of them or
their parents during recent weeks. I should have realised that poor owl
watching weather was poor hunting weather too.
The owl on
the river bank looked at me and blinked, and after about 20 or 30 seconds took
off and flew weakly over the surface of the river, before settling clumsily on
the far side, about 6 metres away, wings spread out, one on the bank and one on
the surface of the water. What should I do?
Would it
be able to climb up the bank? My indecision was short-lived. One of the local
moorhens, currently tending at least its third brood of the summer, launched
into a ferocious attack, legs extended in front of it. The hapless young owl
drifted slowly away from the bank, supported as much by the thick covering of
weed as the buoyancy of its own body. The plucky moorhen had made up my mind
for me – I rushed over the bridge, scrambled through the nettles and down the
bank, and lowered myself into 4 feet of weed, mud and water. As I scooped my
hands under the young bird, and lifted it clear of the water, the cause of its
problems was immediately obvious.
Beneath
the beautiful plumage was little more than a skeleton – I could barely feel any
flesh. Even on its chest its pectoral muscles, essential for flight, were
wasted through lack of food. Maybe the parents had been unable to find
sufficient food during a wet and cold late summer, or maybe the young owl
itself had failed to provide for itself. Whatever the cause, it was clearly too
weak to hunt, and after a couple of hours in a cardboard box on top of a hot
water bottle, it died.
Lifting the cold, lifeless body out of the box, and wiping off some of the mud and weed, marked the lowest point of what had been a miserable summer. Maybe its siblings had had a more successful start to life, and perhaps next summer would be better for owl breeding. I could only hope.
Thursday 2 October 2014
4. An unusual looking ferret
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‘Curtain twitching’ takes on a whole new
meaning when you live in a house in the country with no neighbours within half
a mile. It’s the early morning peep through the curtains before opening them
fully, just in case there is some interesting wildlife scene unfolding outside
the window. Disappointment usually follows, but as the house overlooks a river,
or ‘drain’ as the Environment Agency rather unromantically calls it, I always
lived in hope of seeing one of my favourite birds.
I knew there were kingfishers on this
stretch of the river, and one of the first things I did after moving into the
house was to provide a wooden post at the edge of the water from which they
could fish. Not once in two years had this facility been used, although on one
memorable occasion, as I peered through partly opened curtains, I was able to
watch a kingfisher, not fishing, but bathing and preening on a paving stone
alongside the perch. For several heart-stopping minutes, it repeatedly dropped
into the water and returned to its position to groom its spectacular feathers.
Occasionally, a moment of quiet
contemplation at the window has been rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of what
looked like a turquoise Exocet missile, streaking along the river just a few
inches above the water. How true that some of the best sights occur when you
are not looking for them! Similarly, looking for a particular creature will often
lead to something totally unexpected.
My first thought on this particular
morning, as I peered through a gap in the curtains, was that someone had lost
their ferret. I had seen ferrets before, and know they come in a huge variety
of colours, but I had never seen one this colour before. How it took me so long
to correctly identify it remains a mystery, and it was only when I was
describing it to a work colleague that the penny finally dropped. ‘Dark brown,
almost black, beautiful glossy fur’ - of course it wasn’t a ferret, it was a
mink!
The American mink was first brought to
Europe in the late 1920s, and they were bred for their coats in commercial mink
farms all over Britain. Escapees, and possibly individuals released by animal
rights activists, quickly established a wild breeding population, first
reported in 1956, and they are now a well-established feature of Britain’s
waterways.
I recall a family day out, at some time in
the mid-1980s, walking part of the ‘Viking Way’ by the River Bain. We spotted a
group of hunters in green jackets and long boots, with hounds of some sort, and
we were curious to find out the nature of their quarry. My teenage niece, far
more out-going than anyone else in our family, approached the group of hunters
and asked them what they were hunting. “Mink and coypu” they replied. Both are
invasive species from the Americas with similar histories, although the latter
were finally eradicated in 1989.
Thrilling as it is to see wild animals in their natural environment, I admit to having mixed feelings about seeing a mink. They are fearsome hunters, with no natural predators, and are responsible for eating huge numbers of water vole and riverside birds. I am sure it is no coincidence that it was another anxious six months before I caught a glimpse of a water vole, one of our most treasured neighbours, swimming purposefully across the drain outside our house.
Wednesday 1 October 2014
5.Hopes for a better summer
Hopes for a better summer in 2009, for us as well as our resident barn owls, prompted me to embark on some spring-cleaning. It wasn’t the house I had in mind; it was the owl box in the rafters of the garage. The previous summer had been very successful, and we had had some wonderful views, illuminated by the security lights, of two young owls being enticed out of the nest by their parents, and practising flying a few metres into the field and back several times during the night. Their proud parents looked on, occasionally disappearing to find food.
Aware of legal restrictions on tampering with owl nests, I contacted the Barn Owl Trust for advice. The nest box should be cleaned out every 2 or 3 years, they said, but should be done no later than February to avoid disturbing early broods. It should be done just before dusk on a mild, calm and dry day so that the owls are not flushed out into bright light or extreme weather.
It was dark by the time I had everything ready, and the February evening was crisp and clear. I expected the box to be empty, but I made quite a racket as I placed the ladder against a beam close to the entrance to the box, and half expected a sudden flight from the box. I waited a couple of minutes with the beam of my torch on the entrance, but nothing happened – they must be out hunting. I had on my dust mask and a pair of goggles (I remembered a man on Blue Peter describing how, as a teenager, he was blinded by an angry tawny owl when he approached its nest – I wasn’t taking any chances!).
I climbed slowly, brush, shovel, bag and torch stuffed in various parts of my clothing. I held my breath as my head reached the level of the entrance and I switched on the torch. It wasn’t just the depth of the mess in the bottom of the box that struck me – it was the sight of two adult barn owls, fast asleep with their backs to each other in opposite corners of the box! They reminded me of a couple sleeping after an unresolved argument.
Afraid I would wake them I rushed down the ladder. I could spring-clean later, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. I paid them another quick visit, this time with a camera. An hour or so later they had left and I was able to shovel out about 4 inches of the mess that several years of nesting had produced – including the skeleton of at least one baby owl.
Now the box was clean, and I was able to look forward to a spring and summer of successful owl watching, proud in the knowledge that I had helped the breeding success of this beautiful creature. It was not to be. Three days later, as I approached the house after cycling to the village store, I glimpsed a pale object in the long grass by the roadside. Surely it wasn’t what I thought! I cycled back to take a closer look, and yes, it was a barn owl, probably the victim of a collision with a car and almost certainly one of the pair that I had photographed earlier. There was to be no ‘barn owl summer’ this year.
Tuesday 30 September 2014
6.Kitchen sink drama
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There have been times when, as a scene unfolds in front of me, I find it difficult to believe that what I am watching is not being stage-managed. Yet these dramas are often played out in the most mundane of circumstances. I shall never forget one particular drama that was acted out as I was washing the dishes during the particularly cold winter of 2009-10 – a kitchen sink drama if ever there was one.
As is so often the case, it started with a glimpse of movement. This time it was directly beneath the window, and once again my first guess, that it was a bird ducking underneath the small gate, was wrong. I leant forward to see what had distracted me from my chores (it doesn’t take very much) and was quite surprised to see that it was a stoat, struggling to make its way out of the drive towards the bridge. The reason for its exertions was shockingly clear – visible to the right of its head, which it held impossibly high, were the wings of a small bird, probably a chaffinch, still flapping desperately.
The stoat struggled on past the brambles on the river bank, and then lifted its front legs and its struggling captive onto the low wall that runs alongside the bridge. I knew there was no time to reach for my camera, so I shifted my position to see more clearly. What happened next took my breath away. Without warning a bird of prey, obviously attracted by the flapping of wings, dropped from above and covered the stoat with its own outstretched wings. It was a female sparrow hawk, a regular visitor to the garden, but by the time I had recognised her she was taking off again. Her talons were empty and the wall was bare. The only winner in this cruel drama was the stoat – it had disappeared into the cover of the brambles. The hawk went hungry, but the fate of the finch was much worse.
The whole episode had lasted no more than ten seconds, but what an experience! How many hours, days or even years would I have to sit with a camera to capture such a sequence of events? The lesson, of course, is ‘be vigilant’. Anyone interested in wildlife can be a witness to such events, as long as their eyes are open and not glued to the washing-up bowl or the television.