Contents

The story of our life in the Lincolnshire countryside, and its most significant wildlife episodes, has come to an end after thirteen years, following our re-location to North Yorkshire in March 2014. For that reason, I have re-arranged the posts into chronological order, with no new posts planned.

Contents

1.  Moving to the country - the deal clincher
2.  Lodgers
3.  A sad ending
4.  An unusual looking ferret
5.  Hopes for a better summer
6.  Kitchen sink drama
7.  An overseas visitor
8.  A wake-up call
9.  Humour
10.  At last!
11.  Brief encounters
12.  Red in tooth and claw
13.  Survival
14.  The eagle has landed
15.  Empty nest syndrome
16.  Expert fisherman
17.  Nesting
18.  Death
19.  High hopes
20.  Soap opera or Greek tragedy
21.  An interesting December
22.  Taking the Mick
23.  Spring - at last!
24.  A disabled shrew
25.  Winter 2014
26.  A final post

1. Moving to the country - the deal clincher

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!

2. Lodgers

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.

3. A sad ending

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.

4. An unusual looking ferret

‘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.

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.

6.Kitchen sink drama

There have been times when, as a scene unfolds, I find it difficult to believe that what I’m 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 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 soon became shockingly clear. To the right of its head, which it was holding impossibly high, I could now see the wings of a small bird, probably a chaffinch, still flapping desperately as it tried to escape.

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 it would be impossible to rescue the bird, even if that had been the correct course of action, neither did I have time to reach for my camera, so I shifted my position and watched, fascinated and horrified.

What happened next took my breath away. Without warning, a male sparrow hawk, obviously attracted by the flapping of wings, dropped from above and covered the stoat with its own outstretched wings. The sparrow hawk, a regular visitor to the garden, took off again within seconds, its talons empty, and the stoat disappeared into the cover of the brambles. One nil to the stoat.

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 dramas, as long as your eyes are open, and not glued to the television or your ‘phone.