Searching for owls…

This morning I decided to walk the dog in the fields near the Hansons Nature Reserve – just over  a mile from where I live - which are a good area for seeing owls.  We are fortunate to have a small number of barn owls around this area, and like short eared owls they hunt around ungrazed pasture – rough grassland where voles live.  As explained here  this allows a “litter” layer to develop which then becomes a home for voles, their favoured prey. 

The fields between the canal and the reserve provide just such a habitat and have not been grazed for some years.  Nestboxes are also provided for the barn owls - on poles the other side of the lake from the  nature reserve amongst the fishing lakes.

At times we have also had short eared owls here in the winter, which are wonderful to see– although I have not seen them in recent years.  It seemed worth having a look this morning to see whether they were around as the weather was not good and sometimes rainy weather pushes the owls out to hunt by day. 

There is a similar but smaller area of uncut pasture in the common quite near my house (see photo) and the preference for hunting this part of the common is very clear when the kestrels are around (or more occasionally the barn owl) as they are invariably hovering over this area rather than other parts of the common.

I was shocked to hear that barn owl numbers are estimated to now be around only 1,000 pairs in the UK after a very bad year in 2013.  According to a Guardian report http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/14/barn-owls-threatened-freak-weather there may only be a thousand pairs in the UK, although the estimate on the RSPB page is four times that many.  In any case this is very low, so here’s hoping that the milder winter this year (so far) will help.

In the event, today, there were no owls to be seen and very few birds altogether: a flock of lapwings flew overhead; a few crows, magpies, ducks and herons – which were roosting in the heronry – and given the ferocity of the wind and intensity of the rain, I couldn’t blame them.

Barn owl

Finally the sun has come out today and I have been able to get into the garden and to do some harvesting and to water the greenhouse.  Ironic though it seems, that had got very dry.  I have posted some photos of some of the produce (some doing well enough - broad beans, potatoes, beetroot and lettuce of course) on  my Welsh blog and some, like the courgettes and dwarf beans, have not been very happy.

But it is not just the plants that have felt the effect of the wet and cold weather that we have had for so long.  Last Saturday as I walked the dog on the common in a gap between the showers I saw a barn owl hunting.  As it was just around 2.30 in the afternoon, it must have been  desparate to be out hunting at this time in the summer.  The previous night (and I think the one before, too) it had rained very heavily most of the night, and so the owl would not have been able to hunt.  Whilst it was lovely to see it flying, I did not see it catch anything and could only hope that it had some success as perhaps it had young to feed

Whitethroat and late Spring update

Or perhaps it should be summer.  But sitting here on a cold evening and looking out at the rain, it certainly doesn't feel like summer, and the plants don't quite know what to do either.  First we had a lovely early warm spell in March, then a really rainy period, then a hot week or was it even 10 days? not quite I don't think - but long enough for our free draining garden to get very dry, and then just when all the watering had started again, it started to rain and the temperature dropped massively.

Even so, the garden has looked lovely - but it would be good if it were warm enough to hang around in it.  We've had a new visitor though, or perhaps I've just noticed it. My friend Jenny has been over, and we noticed a bird singing that we tried to identify (or rather she did) and I wasn't sure what it was, but on looking it up, thought it might be a whitethroat.  All the features fitted, and the behaviour - perched on top of a tree.  But it is supposed to be a bird that visits woodland heath and scrub, according to a British Garden Birds (but then I suppose there is a clue in the title that it might also visit gardens).  In any case I have not seen it before this year.  And to double check identity I checked the song and recorded its calls, too.

I only wish I had a good enough camera to take photographs of it, (or there might be a pair, I'm not sure yet) but I haven't.

And now we are in June and I have not seen or heard a cuckoo at all this year, though Jim did, a few weeks ago on the common.  Whilst Jenny was here we went to the Hanson nature reserve, which was very peaceful.  The highlight was seeing the Great Crested Grebes' courtship dance - another first for me, and lovely to watch (though a bit late maybe??)

There were many bees around too, on the massive amount of comfrey that grows there and is flowering at the moment - very tall this year with the rain, and much of it has flopped over.  I could see that there were different kinds of bees - but don't know which they are.  I will get out my bee identification chart, but apparently they are not easy to identify.  The photos show one of the little lakes with the flags out in the reserve and a bee on the comfrey

Another first from a few weeks ago was seeing jays flying over the garden to the shrubs and trees beyond.  I have not noticed jays nearby before although I do see them around Milton Keynes.  It just reminded me what pretty birds they are.

Spring update

I am still finding it hard to contribute to this blog as I favour making entries in the other blog http://aildysgu.blogspot.co.uk in order to keep practising and writing in Welsh and just don't find the time for both. Of course, many of the entries are about nature and gardening anyway, although it is always harder writing about them in Welsh.

Over the past few weeks I have seen a barn owl locally – just a passing view, but am told there are a pair down by the old church near the nature reserve, so hope to get along at some point. We saw a yellow hammer on a walk a couple of weeks ago – which are now unusual enough here to warrant a mention. I’m always happy to see lapwings which are not generally frequent in the fields, but do use the spits of land on the flooded gravel pits.

Now that the bird feeder is established in the garden, and the one car, who is now fairly old is not hassling the birds, we are seeing more the garden is now getting a lot more birds, although nothing very unusual. Among the finches we get chaffinches, goldfinches and greenfinches. Great tits, coal tits and blue tits. We have had long tailed tits but they are not around now, and neither are the goldcrests we have seen in previous years, unfortunately. Other visitors are blackbirds, a pair of starlings (which are on the decline apparently), collared doves, wood pidgeons, robins and sparrows (although these are rather occasional). More frequently we see dunnocks and also the occasional wren.

The sighting I have enjoyed most recently was a stoat – although it was rather a short event as it was running across the road.

We now have a hose pipe ban in this area and so the jobs in the garden are getting harder. I do try to be very conscious of water use and always re-use water that I have washed up with (i.e. empty it where it is needed in the garden). Even so, with our large garden, watering all the vegetables by hand is hard work. We don’t water ornamental plants unless they have bee recently planted, and given the dry weather we have not been planting except for the Amelanchier tree to replace the dead cherry that fell on our car in the January gales.

I’m still not very good at identifying trees and the one in the photo is one that has striking flowers coming out when we saw it (a week ago) and I am not sure what it is.

Great white egret

We went along to the Hanson nature reserve, or Linford Lakes at around 3.45 today, just as the light was starting to go on what had been a beautiful sunny day. (I nearly had another close nature encounter earlier when I saw some mushrooms growing on a city grass verge, spotted from the bus as it passed, and considered stopping on the way back to investigate, but after 3 hours' shopping, sense prevailed and I left them alone). There has been a great white egret at the Lakes for some weeks. We didn't see it when we went with the organised trip a few weeks ago, but have intended to go back since, both to see whether we could see the egret, and to see whether we might see the short eared owls or barn owls.

We went to the first hide which overlooks the lake and the spit. The lake seemed very busy: the usual ducks, quite a few swans, a small number of lapwings and one or two egrets that were still wading with the remainder roosting in the trees. We counted around 22, but the light was starting to fail and we had not seen the great white, until another bird watcher came in and pointed out that it was roosting with the others. And indeed it was. Much bigger, and still light enough to see its yellow bill and to get an impression of its size when it moved around (though we had not noticed previously!)

After 5-10 minutes it flew across the lake and we had a good view of it flying - and we presume it went off to roost somewhere else. We kept our eyes open for the owls but did not see any. When I have seen the owls, it has usually been from the public footpath at the top of the field, near the canal, rather than from the nature reserve lakes which are in the valley, but we did not have time to go there before it got dark.

I knew (or thought I knew) that the great white egret is not normally found in North Western Europe and probably had a long way to come (unlike the small white egrets which were in northern France before they came over to the UK) but I had not realised how much it is a bird of the tropics. Presumably the British climate is rather a cold one for it, although there have been a number of sightings recently.

Autumn sightings and hearings

Autumn this year continues to be amazingly mild. I picked raspberries again yesterday (November 18th) and although there weren't many it was amazing to have any!

I have seen a couple of sparrowhawks recently, and as I didn't get good views, this prompted me to look up images of sparrowhawks in flight and to read descriptions to ensure that these were not kestrels. But I am fairly certain from the flight and behaviour and what was going on.

The first was a "fly-by". Whilst cycling on a path which borders the canal last week, a bird of prey appeared ahead of me and glided past me, very skilfully flying between two poplars and disappearing. This is typical sparrowhawk behaviour - like goshawks, they can weave in and out of wooded habitat, which kestrels typically don't do. The glide is sparrowhawk like too.

Then a few days later, hearing a commotion, I looked up to the sky to see crows harrassing a bird of prey. This was quite a long way up, and the bird was circling, gliding and occasionally flapping, with the crows in hot pursuit. Again the flight pattern was indicative of a sparrowhawk and also the flap and glide pattern. And when I looked up the silhouette, that too indicated sparrowhawk. There are also kestrels near where I saw the birds, but usually these are hovering and often their tails are more fanned out - and the body has a different shape.

But it is still not always easy when you don't get a good view. I did get a good view of a buzzard the other day though. We have a small number around - in fact I think it is mainly one pair that nests in the woods beyond the field I usually walk in. So they are to be seen circling around from time to time. But this one flew into the trees the other side of the river and perched there for a while, giving me an excellent view, before flying off. And that, I thought, was the end of it. However as I walked back later, again I heard a noise and saw that the buzzard was back near the trees above the river, being mobbed by crows. We have crows, rooks and jackdaws in this area but I think it is the crows that are the main "mobbers".

Another hunting bird is the tawny owl. I have not seen a tawny owl for many years. And indeed they are more likely to be heard. And cycling home on Monday night through the fields as I left work I heard the eerie hoots of an owl and it was a good start to the journey home.

I'm hoping to visit our local reserve today, where there are short eared owls - or one at least. Visiting at around 3-4 gives the best chance of a sighting as they are often active towards the end of the day, though in winter of course, they (and barn owls sometimes) can often be seen in the day when daylight is in short supply.

Marsh tit and early autumn round up

Clearly I am not managing to post to this blog very often - which does not mean that my interest in natural history has waned. Rather, it is a reflection of 1) prioritising my welsh blog Ailddysgu and 2) that I do at times do the nature related blogging in Welsh that I would otherwise do in English - and having limited time, as always.

Yesterday Jim and I went on a walk at the Hanson reserve - our local nature reserve - with our county bird recorder, Andy. The weather was kind and we had an ausipcious start, as he told us that the bird flying so quickly past us and the hedge was a sparrowhawk. Although I do see sparrowhawks from time to time around us, I certainly could not identify such a bird flying past very quickly - giving you only a glimpse.

It made me realise that we had not been to the reserve for some time, but apparently there is a short-eared owl there again so I will plan to go a bit more often and see if I can spot it. There is also a great white egret around - and has been for a month so hope to look for that too. It was not apparent yesterday, at any rate.

In addition to the water birds (the usual crew of lapwing, heron, many black headed gulls and one common gull - which I don't think I've seen before, heron, shoveller, teal, coot, gadwall, widgeon, swans, canada geese, cormorants and a very large roost (around 16?) of little white egrets) we saw a beautiful bird at the woodland hide. This was a marsh tit - which I have never seen. Apparently they are quite difficult to separate from willow tits, but Andy was pretty certain that this pair were marsh tits - and pointed us to all the features to support that identification. Not that I would be able to tell the difference if I see another one. It was a striking bird - much prettier than it looks in the field guide with a warm, buffish colour on its breast and a very smart black cap. The photo is my best go on my little camera - but it is not really able to show it very well.

We are having quite a mild autumn so far, having had really hot weather at the beginning of the month. To round up: in the last couple of months, I have seen a kingfisher on the way back from work on the river - I stopped my bike having seen a bird fly past quickly and as it perched on the bank, saw that it was a kingfisher before it flew back again. A few weeks earlier I saw the first weasel I have seen for a long time - running across the road this time. And a couple of weeks later we saw a large fox on our way back from the city centre. Again, I have not seen a fox for quite a while, though the rabbit population is still pretty high with a large number on the verges as we drove back into Newport Pagnell last night.