Stag fright.

Expect the unexpected in October?  Well, during this morning’s stroll along the Dyke I was fully prepared for a vagrant warbler, had dutifully scanned the newly arrived fieldfares for something a little more Siberian, and was braced at any moment for one of the burgeoning local bunting flock to give me a ‘tic’; however, I wasn’t prepared for the undergrowth to rustle ominously before disgorging the closest thing to megafauna that this country possesses.  Two bloody great red deer stags emerged from the scrub, took a brief look at my startled expression, and bottled it completely.  They pegged it, out across the fields and away westwards, giving me little time to unsling a camera and get some sort of distant blurry record shot of the event.

Red on the left, roe on the right, for scale.

Fisher - German Bight

                                               

After a wet weekend at Flamborough, the last of the weather continued into Monday, drenching the fens with constant rain. It was still drizzling on Tuesday morning, and I did not expect much in the way of bird activity to lighten the day. A glance through the window in the back door, therefore, had me overtaken by amazement.

Just three yards away, perched like a garden ornament sat the sullen brown form of a kestrel. Hunting cannot have been easy for it over the last couple of days, so it was perhaps no surprise to see it slumped like this, but for it to be right outside the back door was most unusual. Although I often see kestrels from the garden, this is the first time one has been in the garden itself- so what had drawn it there.

Grabbing my bins for a better look, I noticed its bill seemed to be covered in some kind of I-don't-know-what. Through the scope, it became clear- it was slug.

For the next hour, as the day slowly dried out, the bird, a juvenile female, just sat and moped. Eventually, I decided to risk approach, if only to assess its condition. It allowed me to creep up to a metre away before awkwardly taking a new position on a plastic chair.

The sun came out, and at last the Kestrel moved, retreating to a bramble tangle at the back of the garden.  

The sunshine seemed to give the bird renewed energy, and eventually it started hunting- confirming that it was indeed slug slime that had caked its bill. It loped across the grass and started chewing on them- rather reluctantly it seemed. After each slug, it spent some time digesting while perched in on of the recently pruned plum trees.
I don't know about you, but for me, eating slugs has to be a last resort, so I decided to provide an alternative. I dug up a couple of worms, and chucked them on the grass below the bird.

I wasn't sure it would work, but almost before I could shout "here, Kes, Kes, Kes!", the bird floated down onto the worm and ate, ravenously.
Normally every fork-full of earth in my garden abounds with fat juicy worms- but annoyingly they were hard to come by now as I spent the next few hours trying to make life easier for the falcon.
I went inside as a grey cloud threatened, and started uploading all the photos I had taken. As the skies darkened further, I glanced back out to see if the Kestrel had also taken shelter.
There was no sign.
I picked up the bins and went back outside in the gloom, scanning the plum trees and the larger apple tree.
A sudden movement took me by surprise, as the Kestrel hop-scuttled towards me, only ten feet away. There was a small tree between us, and the kestrel bounced onto its lowest branch, only a foot off the ground. Shifting a nearby flower pot, I found a small worm and gently lobbed it- but it lodged on a dangling twig. Briefly, the worm stretched downward as if reaching out for the earth, before dropping. Kes looked studiously, and then hopped down and calmly swallowed the worm.
Dusk fell and the falcon disappeared, and the next morning there was no sign of it.
Then, there it was again- still after the slugs.
It was weaker now though, and when I approached it in the late afternoon, it couldn't fly with any strength. I found a big box to put it in, and went up to town to get some meat. It took some chicken liver, at first when persuaded with tweezers, but as evening drew on it started to take scraps on it's own.
I left the bird in the box, with a few scraps of meat and the lid uncovered, thinking that if it had the strength it would fly off, and in the meantime there would be food and shelter.
Sadly that night was its last, and whether through stress or hunger it died.

I weighed it at 140 grams. It should have been at least 190, so it is perhaps no surprise that by the time I caught it, it was already past  the point of no return, resigned to the fate of many birds of prey during their first year of life. 

                                      

Reach out.

All quiet on the blog I see.  It’s almost as if my fellow authors are not enjoying their birding this autumn.  Certainly the winds haven’t been especially kind so far, but how bad can it be?  I mean, it’s not as if they were on the Yorkshire east coast on the same afternoon a first for Britain was found but somehow contrived not to see it, is it?...

While they’ve been not seeing rare swifts, I’ve been dutifully strolling up and down the Devil’s Dyke and watching autumn slowly begin to take hold.  A steady trickle of redwings and fieldfares have been in evidence for a couple of weeks, and an influx of song thrushes occurred last weekend, right on cue following a similar arrival on the North Norfolk coast a couple of days earlier, witnessed by Ben and me as we scoured the dunes for something a little rarer at Burnham Overy.  We returned from that particular escapade with nothing more notable than a pied fly, redstart and the inevitable yellow-browed warbler, so it was back to the local patch for me.

With the dominant westerly airflow and mostly warm, sunny days it’s all been pretty steady, but the pleasure of working a patch lies in the small day-to-day changes.  Each day brings subtle differences: a preponderance of skylarks one day, the fields covered in starlings the next, a little fall of goldcrests in the scrub or a resting flock of golden plover in the fields. 

It’s not for the sedentary though, I’m clocking up the mileage up and down the Dyke and surrounding countryside, but the miles walked paid off a little this weekend, firstly on Saturday with a splendid male redstart at Reach – the village at the northern end of the Dyke.  This little gem posed for a couple of trademark blurry long-range record shots before one of the local robins chased it off to the far side of the emu paddock, beyond the range at which even I consider photographs acceptable.  

What’s that?  Emu?  Yes, you heard me right, I’ve seen emu in the Ely10 – expect that to turn up on next year’s bird race list for sure.

This was followed up on Sunday by a stonechat on the Dyke – the first after nine months of patrolling my regular route.  Emboldened by this (relative) success, I pressed on further afield, up Reach Lode and across Tubney Fen.  Here I encountered more stonechats while a lone siskin chimed overhead, before a female merlin cruised across the fen, its all-business, laser-direct path in search of an unwary skylark or meadow pipit in stark contrast to the endless random sampling of the hovering kestrels and lazy circling of a lone buzzard overhead.

Finally deciding I’d walked far enough I turned for home and, while grilling a tit flock on the edge of Reach for that ever-elusive inland sprite, a stuttering call revealed a redpoll which flew off to the north, before a quiet chipping attracted my attention to a couple of tree sparrows feeding unobtrusively along the drove.  Improbably I then encountered a small flock of the latter shortly afterwards, at least four birds by a game cover crop on the edge of Swaffham Prior.  I presume these were migrants, as other than a single dispersing bird on the Dyke in August, they were the first I’d seen on patch.  Hopefully they’ll stick around.

All things considered a decent weekend – nothing Earth-shattering, but when you work an inland patch, particularly one without significant waterbodies, one must curtail one’s expectations somewhat and take satisfaction in the scarcities and local oddities that you turn up.  The redstart certainly gave me more joy than the one flitting about in the dunes at Burnham Overy a week earlier.  There are a couple of weeks of autumn proper left, so I’ll keep scouring those tit flocks in the hope of a little striped Phyllosc, surely it's only a matter of time?...

Bandits over Burwell.

Well, that certainly had the desired effect.  As Ben has made his long-awaited and welcome return with his fascinating in-depth account – or perhaps saga is a better word? – of his recent exhilarating encounter with a stray sparrow, I will respond with a tale of a somewhat more prosaic wildlife experience.

You recall that handsome male peregrine, coolly surveying the world below him from his perch high on an electricity pylon?  Well it turns out he’s not alone: I encountered three different peregrines during my walk on the other morning, and far from chilling out and playing it cool, this time they meant serious business…

The first clue I had that something was afoot was, as ever, an eruption of blind terror in the flocks of various species in the fields alongside the Dyke.  From lesser black-backs to linnets, everything went up in panic and I soon discovered why.  I picked up the young tiercel just as he effortlessly ate up the space to the frantic woodpigeon in his crosshairs, pulled alongside and then committed an absolutely scandalous two-footed lunge straight from the Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris playbook …  Ooof!  Right in the cloaca!  That’s got to hurt, Clive.  Both birds spun in a cartwheel, a cloud of feathers spiralling outwards before, improbably, the pigeon somehow broke free and accelerated away, still trailing feathers.  If anything, he’s almost hit that too well, Clive. 

The young peregrine, disgruntled at the pigeon’s escape, responded by simply dropping a gear and in a flash was striking again; this time the pigeon evaded by scant millimetres by executing an improbable high-G turn at the last second.  The pigeon had run out of that most precious commodity – altitude – now, and was low over the fields, making a beeline for the nearest hedgerow, but this young peregrine had clearly already learned a trick or two from its parents and, using the momentum from its failed attack, it pulled up into a stall, rolled onto its back and, with a couple of languid flicks of those long wings, put the hammer down, converting its potential energy into blistering speed as only a hunting peg can.  The hedgerow was close, but the wounded woodie didn’t stand a chance; the peregrine came in just a few feet above the wheat stubble and this time it read the pigeon’s turn, connecting with another silent explosion of feathers, giving the appearance from my vantage point of the pigeon being completely obliterated by the contact.  Unfortunately the hedgerow that so nearly provided the pigeon with its salvation then obscured my view of the peregrine enjoying its meal, and I reluctantly moved on.  Maybe I could find a tree sparrow further up the Dyke?

I’d reached the furthest point of my pre-work walk, just short of the Burwell Road, and was about to turn back when I glanced up to see a familiar shape in the sky above me.  Another peregrine, this time an adult female, heading for the pylon just north of the road, where she alighted to join her mate – the same white-breasted male I’d encountered at the weekend.

What followed over the next 20 minutes or so was amongst the most spectacular displays of sustained aerial mastery I’ve ever had the privilege to witness – and I have spent much of my life watching various raptors for a living, including a memorable five minutes looking on incredulously as an Eleonora’s falcon attempted to lay a glove on a male Mauritius kestrel.  But that’s a story for another time.

The two birds had a pop at anything resembling a pigeon that was foolish enough to fly past, seemingly hunting cooperatively and putting the wind up every bird from Burwell to Swaffham Prior.  I watched six attacks, mostly instigated by the male, with the female often following his stoop and making a second attack on his target or another member of the scattering flock when he missed.  Some were aborted quickly when it became clear to them that the selected prey was a little too distant or had seen them too early, but a couple were very close calls: one searing, stooping attack by the male on a desperately fleeing collared dove missed by millimetres, the point of almost-contact occurring at eye-level just 15 m from me, the dove saved from grasping talons by a lucky final split-second course alteration.  The tearing silk sound of displaced air filled my ears as the tiercel arced past on swept wings, although I’m not sure if the high-pitched stream of obscenities I’m sure I heard at that moment came from me or the escaping dove.

The sixth attack was the only one to be instigated by the female.  After a few minutes perched up she seemingly became bored of waiting for something to fly past and took matters into her own hands (talons?) and set off to the north in a shallow powered dive towards a distant hedgerow festooned with unwary woodpigeons.  They belatedly noticed the danger as she ate up the distance and the hedgerow erupted as the flock tried to gain altitude and evade the oncoming nightmare.  Everything that followed was a distant blur of stoops, turns and tail chases low over the distant fields, with flocks of various species scattering into the air in panic as the two hunting peregrines chased down whichever target looked most likely.  I lost sight of the female but the male, who had dutifully followed his mate in on the initial attack, eventually singled out another woodpigeon and, like the younger bird earlier, simply chased it down, missing once, twice, but remaining glued to its tail and after each miss effortlessly closing the distance again for another strike.  The inevitable took place far off towards Reach, another silent puff of feathers marking the end of the pigeon’s resistance and chalking up another kill for a master assassin.

Today i saw a sparrow.

From the outside looking in.

A new voice on the blog.  An outsider – from Yorkshire, having moving to this part of the world three and a half years ago, and now living just outside the hallowed Ely10 itself.  I'd better confess at the outset that one of my motivations in joining the blog is to try to provoke a response from Ely’s most mercurial and elusive resident artist, birder, raconteur, flat Earth denier, Bill Oddie impersonator and formerly prolific blogger.  Time will tell if I am successful, but fans of blogs written entirely in the lower case, bad puns, and sly digs at Dunc’s writing style and listing tendencies should watch this space.

The Big House, from exactly ten miles away.

Having spent a couple of years in Ely and Littleport, a move earlier this year means my local patch is now the Devil’s Dyke – a slice of scrub and calcareous grassland that slices neatly through the arable farmland south of Burwell, from the A11 north to Reach, plunging across the boundary of the Ely10 recording area around the point where it crosses the Swaffham Prior – Burwell Road.  I spend the majority of my time on the section south of this, but the mere geographical inconvenience of being outside the blog’s eponymous recording area has never stopped Dunc and Ben using it to wax lyrical about exploits from Yorkshire to France to the Gravesend beluga sanctuary, so I’m not going to let such a trifling matter stop me from waffling on.

We’ll start in the present.  The past week or so has been entertaining enough.  Saturday 22 September produced a widespread southward passage of meadow pipits – moving on a broad front across the area in small flocks.  I tallied about 150 over the course of a couple of hours along the Dyke, but given the broad front of the movement I’m sure many thousands more were passing across the breadth of the Ely10.  Naturally, this was not a localised phenomenon, and further afield at sites more conducive to vismig observations than the expanses of the Fens some very large counts rather put mine into the shade (have a look at the splendid Trektellen.nl – 11,000 at Anglers Country Park in Yorkshire, 10,000 at Winter Hill, Bolton, 7,000 at Spurn and even 500+ in Rutland).  

It wasn’t just mipits on the move though, as as my walk continued up to Reach and around various footpaths and lanes I eventually encountered a tit flock which provided only my second spotted flycatcher of the year, sallying out from the hedgerow in a manner once familiar but now, unfortunately, seen with ever decreasing frequency.

You’ll have noticed I’m not much of a photographer – I occasionally point a Lumix bridge camera (carried mostly just in case I find something exciting enough to require photographic documentation) at an obliging bird, but in the main I prefer to take records in my memory and notebook.  Old fashioned perhaps, and not ideal for those three of you that come here for the lush photography on display. 

Back on the Dyke the following Monday and a familiar low but far-carrying, growling ‘pronk, pronk’ pricked up my ears and transported me immediately to the moors of the Dark Peak.  I looked up to see a couple of hulking black silhouettes cruise overhead, shortly followed by a third.  Ravens, of course, still seeming somewhat incongruous to me over the agricultural landscape of the lowlands.  They pushed on purposefully westwards, having brightened my morning considerably.

This Saturday brought high pressure, little breeze (though still infuriatingly and resolutely from the west) and glorious sunshine.  There was frost on the ground as I set out and the fields were full of yellowhammers, grounded migrant meadow pipits and suddenly conspicuous and vocal skylarks.  The local linnet flock was ever-increasing, at least 400 birds provoked into swirling, panicked flight by a hunting sparrowhawk, while from a pylon nearby a male peregrine looked on disdainfully, patiently waiting for the foraging flock of pigeons in the fields to come just a little bit closer...