Category: Birds

Some Pheasant, Some Neck!

sparrowhawk

11.15 a.m., drizzly and overcast: A male sparrowhawk swoops close to the bird feeders and lands on the hedge. Pheasant wouldn’t normally be on the menu for him but that doesn’t stop him looking down on two hen pheasants that have been foraging beneath the feeders.

Just in case he’s considering them as his brunch, they extend their necks and puff out their feathers to appear two to three times their regular neck size.

pheasnat display

They strut and hop, half spreading their wings and fanning tail feathers, a hip-hop swagger that reminds me of prairie-chickens lekking.

pheasant strutting
Continue reading Some Pheasant, Some Neck!

Nestbox Clear-out

sketches

As I trim the dripping hawthorn and holly, the misty droplets in the morning air gradually build into soft rain. A robin hops around me as I work.

The sparrow terrace nestbox gets its first ever clear-out. I’m surprised that the far compartment of the three-hole box is almost empty as this was always the one favoured by sparrow, blue tit and bumble bees. The middle box contains the remains of a nest although I don’t remember it ever having been used.

Clearing it out, I evict a tiny moth, several small green caterpillars and, below the surface layer of moss, hundreds of sticky, silky cocoons, perhaps those of bee moths.

Song Thrush on Sumac

The berries on next door’s stagshorn sumac have been attracting a pair of blackbirds. This afternoon, a song thrush came to feed on a cluster of berries in the upper branches.

Buzzard

4.15 p.m.: A buzzard flies up from the ash at the edge of the wood. In the 1980s we never saw buzzards here and the ash was a regular lookout post of a kestrel, a bird of prey we rarely see in recent years.

Penguin Dance

I’ve often seen great-crested grebes go through their head-shaking, ritualised preening display, but at last this morning at RSPB St Aidan’s, we got to see the presentation of beakfuls of water-weed and the penguin dance where the male and female rise from the water, breast to breast, paddling furiously and swaying heads. They appeared to drop the weed as they started this routine. They then returned to head-bobbing display.

We’ve yet to see the ‘ghostly penguin’ and the ‘cat display’ which apparently start off the whole routine.

Canada Goose

Canada goose spread

This morning a skein of 60 or 70 wild grey geese went over, heading west. Our local Canada Geese meanwhile had gathered on a shingle bank on the quiet inner bend of the meander of the River Calder around the marshy field known as the Wyke.

Canada goose

This is my final spread for my Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate Domestika course by Román García Mora, drawn on the iPad in Procreate.

Canada goose

Canada Goose Plumage

plumage studies

Canada goose plumage swatches, drawn on the iPad in Procreate for my Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate Domestika course by Román García Mora.

The Birds of Paris

Paris birds cartoon

The original Collins Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe included bird names in Dutch, French, German and Swedish. The rose-ringed parakeet didn’t get a mention in my 1967 edition. Since then its made itself at home in Paris and on just one occasion we watched a pair briefly visit our bird feeders.

Happy birthday to Antonin.

Operation Osprey, 1973

Osprey sketchbook

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through a 3-week stint as a volunteer warden for the RSPB’s Operation Osprey at Loch Garten.

osprey sketchbook page

A squirrel came down from the shutters into the hide and ran off with an entire Rich Abernethy biscuit.

The female osprey seemed considering an extension to the nest . . .

  1. Because the young are growing and knock her out of the nest every time they exercize
  2. the nest slipped over the other day.
sketchbook

WEDNESDAY 1st of AUGUST

Up Cairngorm with Linda & Bill . . . by chairlift to the middle station: the top section was closed because of high winds. Just beyond the Ptarmigan Restaurant a noise like a motor starting or one of the snow fences creaking in a the wind . . . a ptarmigan, no 3, no 10 . . . we walked towards them when they started moving we counted thirty but when they were still their plumage looked like granite only the white wings showed. Cairngorm had his head in the clouds. We turned back down.