Tag: Jay

Bird of Prey

buzzard

A guest diary from Barbara from three weeks ago:

Tuesday 23rd November 2021

A buzzard chased by a crow swoops between the houses across the road, it appeared to have something long in its talons, Richard said a snake, I doubt it but can’t imagine what it could be

Barbara Bell
crow

We looked in the road to see if it had dropped anything. We now suspect that this must have been an escaped bird of prey with jesses still attached. We thought how unusual it would be to see a buzzard flying so low, even when mobbed by crows, so perhaps it was some other species, such as a harris hawk.

Cache of Nuts

jay

Later that morning we walked around St Aidan’s RSPB reserve in the Aire Valley:

After a welcome cuppa at Rivers Meet, Methley, we stride out back over the river bridge, lovely big blue sky and feeling quite warm in the sun.

We pause to watch a Jay at the side of the path. It seems to have found a cache of nuts and is unearthing them. We watch it from a short distance: the colours of the blue on its wing and the black moustache show up really well in the clear light. Meanwhile a perky robin forages around behind.

Barbara Bell
jay

The jay removed six or more peanuts from each of several holes dotted around the turf within a few yards of each other. Had the jay previously cached them, or had it spotted a squirrel burying them?

We weren’t far from the village of Methley, so perhaps these had come from a garden feeder. In which case I think that it would more likely be a bird that cached them because the river would present too much of an obstacle to a squirrel and we were perhaps 200 yards along the path from the bridge.

Acorns

oakwood

This mixed oak wood at the top end of Coxley Valley is typical of woods on Coal Measures. In the background there are planted conifers: crops of larch and Corsican pine have been planted here, adjacent to Earnshaw’s Saw Mill, although some of them have been badly damaged by grey squirrels.

oak leaves

Even on our short walk around the wood, there’s always something to see. We got a chance to squeeze in a quick visit a couple of days ago and I was determined not to stop to take photographs, but when I saw these frost-rimmed oak leaves, I couldn’t resist getting out my iPhone.

acorns

There are so many acorns this year that in places you crunch over them and they look like pea gravel strewn along the edges of the path. The resident greys haven’t been able to squirrel them away and the flock of wood pigeons, hanging around at the corner of the wood this morning, has come nowhere near making serious inroads into the enormous quantities on offer.

pigeon feather
jay

Wood pigeons are great acorn eaters but jays are the real specialists. We’ve often seen a pair of them flying from a large oak, crops bulging with acorns. On this morning’s walk we hear them screeching somewhere in the background but we’ve yet to spot them here, collecting and caching.

holly

Berries are few and far between on the hollies, which provide some winter cover in the shrub layer of the wood.

earthball

There isn’t a lot of fungus around at the moment but I spotted these common earthballs, Scleroderma citrinum, growing amongst the leaf litter at the top corner of the wood.

badger scrape
badger

What made this scrape amongst the roots of a larch tree?

  • A squirrel? They’d usually make a neater job, they’re discrete in their excavations as they hide and recover acorns
  • A rabbit? Apparently there are some in the wood, so it’s a possibility
  • A fox? Again, you’d expect to see signs of them
  • A badger? Well, yes, I’d go for badger because of the scatter of debris. To me it looks as if it must have been a robust animal doing the digging. There are smaller excavations dotted along the side of the path. I can imagine a badger snuffling and scraping on its way through the wood.

Roadside Buzzard

 

On the lane between Notton and Woolley, a kestrel sits, hunched and huddled, in a roadside tree.

At Woolley Edge, there’s a flash of colour as a jay gets up from a roadside verge. Oak trees grow along the sandstone ridge here, so perhaps it was burying, or retrieving, an acorn.

As we reach the open higher ground at Bretton roundabout, we pass a buzzard sitting on a fence-post at the edge of the road.

As we get nearer to Flockton, we see a second kestrel, hovering over the field by the road.

Notton in the 1800s

Notton from the original Ordnance Survey map, 3D view created in Memory Map.

Looking at our route on the original Ordnance Survey map from the 1800s, I’m surprised to see what a busy landscape this was, with its sandstone quarries, gravel pits and a brick kiln where George Lane meets the Wakefield to Barnsley road.

Just north of the gravel pit there are kennels and, more exotically, three-quarters of a mile to the northeast, there’s a Menagerie, which was part of the Chevet Hall estate.

An osier bed, near the top right corner of my map, would have produced the flexible whips of willow needed for basketmaking.