Garden Birdwatching
Excellent Garden Birdwatching by Charles Neale
We live in the middle Wensum valley in Elsing, surrounded by woodland, arable fields, semi-permanent pasture, meadows & worked-out gravel pits.Saturday 2nd June dawned grey and cool, but by mid-morning the sun had burned off the cloud and in the increasing warmth I was doing a little gentle weeding at the top of the garden. I heard a bird call from overhead not dissimilar to that of common terns which we get from time to time. Looking up through the trees I saw what appeared to be two falcons circling around and diving at each other. No binoculars !!
I hurried down to the house for the ‘bins’ and got good enough views to tell that both birds were Hobbies. I could see their facial patterns and rufous thigh feathers before they circled off to the west and out of my sight. Thoughts of weeding were put aside now I had the binoculars and I turned my attention to the several Jackdaws that appeared to be hawking flying beetles (probably garden chafers, phyllopertha horticola), which had been emerging from the lawns for several days.Next into view came a male Kestrel which I watched for a couple of minutes catching even larger beetles ( cockchafers ?) on the wing in its feet, then bending its head down to eat them in mid-flight. Into view in the far eastern distance came another larger bird flying at right angles to me. It appeared crow-like at that distance, but I was on a roll now and willed it to turn into the north-westerly wind before I would have lost it behind the trees. This it did and I could see it was very buzzard-like. It continued to circle on the wind gliding westwards towards me. As it arrived over the garden I could see it was a Common Buzzard and so did a corvid which took to mobbing it. At this point my wife, Fran, arrived home and was in time to see it before it disappeared into the west.
I showed her the Jackdaws and then into view came a single Hobby, hawking for the beetles in a similar way to that of the Kestrel. We watched it for a couple of minutes until it was lost from sight behind the trees. If I hadn’t heard the initial bird call I would probably not have had this wonderful half hour experience. Two days before this we had seen 4 Mistle Thrushes and 3 Spotted Flycatchers in the garden. Later on Saturday I heard alarm calls from the Mistle Thrushes and saw a Sparrowhawk flying off towards the trees without visible prey. I wonder how many times these sorts of birds had been here before when I have had my head down weeding ? I had better spend more time sky watching and less weeding !!