Peregrine falcons outside my window

As I sit in my room, I can see a white block of flats dominating the skyline against the sea and at the top of this block of flats live a family of peregrine falcons. Last summer I watched them for hours as the parents surveyed the city below and sometimes the three youngsters would playfight in the sky, diving at hundreds of miles an hour. The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal in the world when it dives through the sky. They went away for the Winter but now they're back.

There’s a webcam that shows the interior of the peregrines’ nestbox. At the moment all you can see is the back part of the mother peregrine as she incubates her eggs. The only movement is the swell of her breathing and the wind rustling her feathers. I haven’t seen the male yet this year, but he must be around somewhere gathering food.

On youtube you can see the mother laying her first bright pink egg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GNXz1vmNew&feature=youtu.be. And here is the live webcam: http://www.justin.tv/brightonperegrines? - /w/2934149296/4. Last year we only discovered the peregrines outside the window after the eggs had all hatched and the youngsters had grown up. This year we can watch the whole glorious, surprisingly quick process from egg to young adult.

Isle of Wight wheatears

I was in the Isle of Wight for a few days staying at Rose’s parents’ flat. I went on my own and she joined me later. On one of the days I went for a walk along the clifftops to the Ventnor Botanic Gardens, along a path that dipped and rose between coves and vegetation.

Jackdaws proliferated and I could hear greenfinches and great tits, then at one portion of beach, Castle Cove, which a castle shaped house used to overlook before it was demolished for residential development, there were a number of mystery birds flying about. I looked at them through broken binoculars and struggled to focus. They seemed like wagtails, but their colouring wasn’t quite right. The feathers were greyish brown and the breast was orangey. They sported stylish black eye stripes.

The little birds bounced about discretely, they sung no songs, looking around on the grass and on the sandy beach, perhaps for insects. A teenager was riding a motorbike up and down a grassy bank in his garden. He rode it cautiously down and then as fast as he could the way back up. I followed the birds to the low sandstone cliffs where they seemed to be living.

When I got home I looked them up in a bird book and found them to be wheatears, I think. Their Latin name is Oenanthe oenanthe.

Southampton

I went to see my brother Ben, who lives in Southampton with his girlfriend, Steph. Their flat overlooks the river. As soon as we got there I looked out of the window at the river through their hefty binoculars and saw an oystercatcher. It was standing on a half-submerged wooden structure, which had recently been looted of its metal by opportunistic gypsies. At first I didn’t know what bird it was that I was seeing. It was black and white and anonymous until it revealed the distinctive pointy orange oyster-catching beak that it had been hiding in its feathers.

Near the lone oystercatcher were a group of about twenty other birds all huddled together and still. They were grey. I decided they must be sandpipers; they seemed about the right size. After a while they all flew away. They had been sitting there doing nothing for a few hours and then they just flew away as if they had decided in an instant with one mind.

Steph got some old bread. I think she soaked it in water or milk. We threw it over the balcony for the seagulls. They all swooped about catching the bread chunks in mid air. These seagulls were black-headed gulls with the dark mark beside the eye, which will later spread in the summer and complete the eponymous black head.

They are smaller and friendlier than the aggressive skinhead herring gulls of Brighton and Dover, and they have less grating screeches.

Steph tried to get one to take bread out of her hand but none of them were quite that bold, even when she looked away to make them feel safer. They weren’t hungry enough for such potential danger.

 

(taken by Joe Punton)

A bird close to home

On the way home from town, on the road whose pavement is raised on steps and overlooks the sea, whose houses occupy just one side so as not to spoil the view, we heard a bird’s piercing song. We could see it in a tree but it was too far away to identify for sure. It sounded like a song thrush, but maybe slightly more songlike. A mistle thrush? The only way to know for sure was to rush home and get some binoculars. Home was close, so we did.

The bird had moved tree but we found it by its song in a new tree. It soon stopped singing but we stood and looked at it for a while. It was difficult to see in the fading sunlight. Probably a song thrush. (see previous blog)

As we looked, a friendly vagrant called out to us. He told us that he had seen the meteorite on Saturday 3^rd March. He didn’t think much of it until he saw it on the news the next day. You could probably look it up on the computer but when he left school in 1981 they didn’t have computers. He began to move on.

Then another passer-by shouted to us, asked us what we were looking at. We explained. It must have seemed like there was something extremely interesting in that tree for there to be two people staring into it with binoculars. The man told us that he had seen a program on TV where there were lots of people in a field looking at a rare bird and then a big tomcat came and ate it up.

The vagrant at the other end of the street was shouting something about how he was observing an observer observing the observers.

The late birds ‘get the worm’

We’ve been to the RSPB reserve at Pulborough Brooks once before. This time we had a room booked in a tavern in nearby Bramber so we could take our time and stay until the dusk closing time.

We saw goldcrest, nuthatch, blue tit, great tit, robins, chaffinch, a green woodpecker pecking at the floor right in front of one of the hides, teal, wigeon, shelduck, geese, handsome redwing, fallow deer and noble fallow stag, shoveller, goofy snipe, curlew, lapwings, long-tailed tits at the bus stop, ruffless ruffs, no birds of prey unfortunately, no bullfinch, no crossbill, but out of all the birds we saw, two birds stood out and both of them emerged right at the end of the day.

The sun was setting and it was becoming difficult to tell the birds from the stray leaves and cones in the trees. I heard a loud clear song different from all the robins and the incessant great tits whose songs filled the air. It was like a blackbird in its squawk-like tone but the repeated phrases were shorter: little riffs and arpeggios, liet-motifs, they were more enigmatic, less melodic than the blackbird. I found the bird in the binoculars. It was a song thrush clearly on display on an outstanding branch, showing himself for an evening performance. His colours are humble browns, plump with a creamy speckled belly. I’ve never seen one before or heard one in real life. Such a proud song, I stood and listened for a while, he was still going when we left.

We went back into the visitor’s centre which was just closing and the assistants were relieved to get their binoculars back. A few other lingering visitors were looking through the binoculars and scopes out of the big viewing window. A little chicken sized bird waddled out from the reeds and the expert said we were lucky to be seeing it. It was a water rail, almost a chicken, almost a wader, tentatively pecking on the ground, just long enough for us to get a view through one of the scopes before we were ushered out of the visitors centre so they could close up and go home. The water rail makes a noise like a pig snuffling apparently, but we didn’t get to hear it. It's blue-grey belly and orangey-red bill make a satisfying exotic combination, but it comes across as a slightly unfortunate bird what with the pig-noise it has been lumbered with, the awkward chicken legs and the inelegant name. It seems content for sure, but that arouses the sympathy all the more.

Great Crested Grebe at Shoreham

It was a day I remember almost entirely from beginning to end, every detail in between. We (me and Rose) went to Shoreham, just down the coast from Brighton. We had been told of a nature reserve on the beach with wild flowers and accompanying animals and so went to explore.

Off the crawling meandering bus we wandered against aggressive wind towards the river, which we followed for a while, hoping to see river birds, or any birds, but there was little except mild bending water. Though the sun shone generously in intervals, the wind was unpleasant and made it cold. We walked partway down the river path which would have led to Guildford if we kept going long enough, but we turned back on ourselves across a bridge to what we hoped was a more populous nature world. However the sunny side of the river offered only seagulls and bushes.

I was lacklustre. The wind was annoying me. We went to see the houseboats, a colourful row of converted battleships and barges aground on the riverbank. And then in the river between the boats in the boat street, a bird sailed past. We followed it. It wasn’t a duck or a swan, but something in between. I took photos on my camera and zoomed in to try and see it closer. (I had forgotten the binoculars.) It was a great crested grebe. We followed it excitedly up the river, trying to get closer to it to take a good photo. It just floated along, lazy, majestic, like a purple Mandarin prince visiting from the East.

At home I had a bird magazine with a GCG on the front. I never expected it to make the jump from magazine cover to real life. When we spotted the GCG, the day changed from wind-beaten birdless amble to victory march. The trip had been worth it if only for this and everything else afterwards was coloured by the sight of this colourful bird, long after he had ducked under the water under the bridge away from us  - the subsequent desolate beach stretch of nature reserve peppered with sea cabbage and viper bugloss, the peninsula fortress, the long harbour dead end retracing of steps, the almost missed bus, the fish and chips, all coloured by the sighting of this obliging unexpected bird.

My unimpressive photo

Among a wealth of birds...2

At the Arundel duckworld some of the ducks were caged in large landscaped pens. These were presumably the rarer species less accustomed to survival with rivals, put there to remove all possible risks and ease them back into numbers. In one of these contained environments, a small yellow bird flittered into view. It was either a yellow wagtail or a grey wagtail. Both have distinctive breast yellownesses. With hindsight I’d say it was the yellow wagtail.

It was confined in the cage as far as we could see; as far as we could see, there were no escape holes in the mesh. The yellow wagtail flew around the cage in and out of view and outshone the rare ducks like a secret bonus bird.

We wondered if it was happy in that cage without family and potential mates. The bird attendees must know it’s in there and have deemed it appropriate to leave it in there, and we trust them to know what’s best for the birds, but still it seems a bit lonely.