Friday 8 February 2019

The Great Black-Backed Gull was back on the Long Water, flying around and diving.


It caught a large fish. I've put up the unedited video, nearly 2 minutes long, so that you can see the power of this enormous bird.


It was a wet and windy day, and the Grey Heron sitting in the low nest on the island was keeping its head down and you could hardly see it.


The other herons were out of their windswept nests and lined up along the edge of the island, a tactful distance from each other to avoid conflict.


The female Egyptian Goose at the Henry Moore sculpture sheltered her goslings. She glanced suspiciously over her shoulder at a harmless Moorhen passing by.


The Red-Crested Pochard on the Italian Garden pond fluffed up his remarkable bouffant hairdo as far as it would go.


The Great Crested Grebes at the bridge kept station under the willow tree.


The female Peregrine was on the barracks tower.


There were seven Fieldfares on the Parade Ground. I managed to get five of them into one picture, along with two Redwings, one of them much out of focus in the background.


Long-Tailed Tits were foraging in the ground in exactly the same place as I've seen them before, at the bottom of Buck Hill.


Looking at them closely, I could see that they were finding very small yellowish-white larvae about ¹⁄₈ inch (3 mm) long, but I couldn't get a clear photograph of one.


Although it's unusual to see Long-Tailed Tits feeding on the ground, really they were doing much the same as this Robin in the Flower Walk.


The usual Wren in the Flower Walk was dashing around on the path.


The male Nuthatch in the leaf yard ran along the branches of the big oak tree. Nuthatches and Treecreepers like oaks, whose deeply fissured bark contains a lot of insects.


Two Rose-Ringed Parakeets explored a hole in the nearby field maple. They are both female, and no pair has taken this hole as evidently it's too shallow for a nest.

11 comments:

  1. The Egyptian Geese by the Henry Moore had eight offspring today. Any news of the unfortunate cormorant?

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    1. Thanks for the information. That's how many it had when I first saw it. But this is a surprisingly dangerous place, and I don't think this pair has ever managed to fledge any young here.

      Couldn't see the Cormorant today.

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  2. And what happened to that even greater bird- has it flown off again? I mean the Gull.

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    1. That's the same GBB as was here a few days ago. Or at any rate it looks the same.

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    2. of course, apols for (hopefully temporary) inattentiveness

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  3. Look at the size of that GBB! It's incredible how it managed to catch such a large fish just by grabbing it in its beak. That bill is fearsome.

    I thought "Mordent" as soon as I saw today's picture of a particularly disheveled Heron.

    I still cannot get over how fortunate it must be to have Long-Tailed Tits dashing about so close to one's feet.

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    1. There's some illness or infection that makes the bills of the herons look tatty. It doesn't seem to affect them in any other way.

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    2. Hope that GBB vid does well on Youtube. There were only two others of gulls catching live fish I could find there, excluding baitballs and parasitism. Jim

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    3. 76 views so far. More than usual but not exactly viral.

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    4. It should. It is quite a rare spectacle, perfectly filmed.

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