Wednesday 25 March 2009

25th March 2009

At c. 1:25 pm today, as I was pushing a bit of lettuce through the wire of my mom's budgie aviary in our garden, a Sparrowhawk flew from behind me into the wire about a metre from where I was standing for a split second, then flew to a bird bath a few metres from me, at which point it quickly realised I was very near to it and hurried off! The strange thing was that I'd been stood next to the aviary for 10-15 seconds and I wasn't exactly frozen still when this happened. Anyway, it took me a while to recover from the shock of this totally unexpected and extremely close encounter!

A little later, I journeyed to Earlswood on my bike again. At the field surrounding the Hungry Horse, I saw a Linnet again and counted 51 Stock Doves (didn't think I'd beat yesterday's count so quickly!). These birds are congregating with corvids at this field because it has recently been ploughed. At the lakes, I saw a ringed adult Lesser Black-backed Gull on one of the buoys at Windmill Pool, but it landed on the water then flew off before I could have a good look at the rings with my scope. At Terry's Pool, 5 Cormorants and 3 Greylag Geese were present. Tufted Duck numbers at the lakes had increased to 11. The highlight of the trip though was seeing a Buzzard and 2 Ravens at what seemed to be a partial Canada Goose corpse in a field in-between Cleobury Lane and Lady Lane (I'd only seen Ravens in flight before today).
M.P. Griffiths

No comments: