Here comes the Green

On Monday morning three little sparks of green arrived at the feeders. Siskins are moving through after spending the winter months down at sea level in damp woodlands, flocking with Redpolls and Goldfinch.

The regular seedeaters - the Goldfinch, Chaffinch, Greenfinch and Reed Bunting are still busily bouncing across the garden to feed, and then returning to the hedge, where they chatter and buzz while the Tits, Wrens, Dunnocks and Robins stake their own claims for the coming season. Half a dozen Woodpigeons have taken to gathering by the pond for a communal bathe before waddling across to pick over the spillage left by the messy finches. They've grown so fat that they struggle to take flight when disturbed. In the denser shrubbery, Blackbirds squawk noisily, and on hte roof, the Jackdaws are gathering wood for their chimney.

The Cherry tree is a blizzard of white blossom and the first Hawthorn leaves are beginning to emerge.

 

Skyscraper

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KnNP9lhzvt0

Under the huge arc of the sky we often feel gloriously pressed up against the heavens in the Fens.  Pushing even harder against the vapours are the towers and lantern of our medieval skyscraper, Ely Cathedral, the eye of the Ely10.  Lockdown#1 favoured the pair of Peregrines that settled late winter 2020 and proceeded, surely aided by a lack of human activity on the tower, to nest and rear young.  It was a hard secret to keep as the adults and subsequently the very showy and vocal youngstars demanded attention over the town - giving frequently tremendous displays as they honed their skills of pursuit on the hapless local pigeons.

They've been territorial again for some time now and a webcam is due to go live on the nest soon.  In the meantime Simon Stirrup has continued to patiently log their activities and has produced more striking images.  The prey item here being a Snipe.  

Me and Ben had a discussion about the potential predator that had left a Snipe for dead on Springhead Meadow a few weeks ago - Ben thought Sparrowhawk but neither of us considered that it might have been a Peregrine.

wood working be easy fam

With the guttering and facure boards getting a massive overhaul, the Starlings were going to feel pretty aggrieved at their nestholes suddenly disappearing. So I figured the best thing to do would be to rescue some of the old wood and see if I could cobble together some sort of container - a box, if you will - that could stand in as a suitable replacement area in which they could build a new nest. This rugged "nesting box", as I shall call it, didn't take much effort to bang together, but I must admit, the task of affixing it to the wall, at a considerable height, was one that I didn't particularly relish. Fortunately I have a man to do things up ladders. I managed to pry him away from his other duties and sent him up, drill in hand, to complete the task. Like some sort of arboreal legend, he was done in a matter of seconds. Good work Stu.

 

When telling people his surname, many people asked Saul - "Why Tarsus?"

I recently bought a pad of watercolour paper I hadn't used before. I wasn't sure what kind of marks I could make with it. It's quite evenly textured, but the texture isn't too rough, and by dragging a fairly dry brush flat across it, I was able to scumble some interesting patterns that reminded me of the sort of sandstone we came across in Morocco. With that in mind, I thought it would be a waste of paper if I didn't try to turn the random marks into some kind of picture, and I immediately thought of a Black- eared Wheatear as a suitable subject. As such, the painting was more of an experiment in texture and colour, than any conscious attempt at getting the details right. You can see that the shadow supposedly cast by the bird is not exactly coherent, and the structure of the rock wall too, is a bit too much like an Escher drawing - but I really was more interested in the colour palette of greys and oranges that typify the desert regions of the Maghreb.

Wheatears have always drawn my attention. They are proud birds, never afraid to perch out in the open for all to admire. of the dozen or so species in the western palearctic, I've been lucky enough to see most of them. All have their subtle idiosyncracies - variations in tail pattern, face mask and colour, and some can be tricky to tell apart. The Isabelline Wheatear is one that eluded me for a long time, but when I finally saw my first, up on the Norfolk coast, the second appeared only a few days later near Wardy Hill. I had always assumed they would be hard to tell from our far more common European Wheatear - but as it turns out, I think Desert Wheatear is a far more likely confusion species.

The European Wheatear is a regular sight on the Norfolk coast in Spring and Autumn, as well as a somewhat harder to find bird inland at the same time of year. Birds headed to Greenland are bigger and brighter than those that breed in this country, and boldly patrol the short sandy coastal turf or black fen fields for a day or two, before heading on. Now March has come back around, the Wheatears will soon be popping up again.