Picked clean

Today, I was on the day shift. Work was quiet and, unusually, we had more people on duty than were necessary. So I took myself off on a couple of long foot patrols. Away from the seething resentment at the office and into the cold but fresh January day. The sky was a clean duck-egg blue and the air was sharp and bitter.

There are parts of the site where I work which, although I have worked here for nearly four years, I had never seen. I decided to put that right. How long might I still have the chance? I walked for half an hour towards a distant corner of the site and crossed a field ready ploughed for a new stand of trees. I was out of radio range and no-one knew where I was. I liked that.



Click for embiggeration.

In some neglected woodland nearby there is a mediæval manor house. The woods are steadily encroaching, and have been since it was abandoned in the C17. It's hard to get to, as there are no roads or even proper pathways nearby, and I got proper muddy. The upside of that was that no-one had thought to surround it with chain-link fence and festoon it with Keep Out signs. It's just there, for anyone who cares to look. I spent a while in and around it, just soaking up the atmosphere.





There is a woodland ride nearby. Well, maybe not a ride: just a wide passage through the trees and undergrowth that has clearly been a major route passing the manor house at some time in the past. Plenty of delicate fallen twigs and dry leaves - and totally undisturbed by human footfall. It was eerily quiet and magically lonely.

And then I found the skull of a fox.



I left it there.

Nightingale

Pretty sure I heard a nightingale singing in the woods behind the house just now. It sang for about five minutes and has now stopped. It was singing long enough for me to find a recording on Youtube, and also an audio file on the RSPB website, and I was able to listen to the recordings through the headphones while I could still hear the bird outside through the open window.

According to the distribution map on the RSPB site, they are not generally found in Wales, but this has been a warm summer and perhaps they have made it a bit further North and West than is usual. Also, the RSPB says they sing until early June and leave in July. So I could be imagining all this. But it's a very distinctive song, and it sounded like nothing else we have round here.

I have only heard one once before, in the South of France on a summer's evening. It's magical.

The highs and lows of country living

Within 30 minutes of each other this morning:

The low: investigating a strange smell in the utility room, and lifting the cat's drinking bowl to find, underneath, the rotting corpse of a mouse, crawling with maggots. Disposed of before Anna could see, with some kitchen roll, a plastic bag and a spray of Flash. Yeurgh.

The high: pottering about outside in the sunshine, hearing the "whee-eur" of a buzzard, looking up, and seeing two buzzards chasing off another bird. As the bird turned in the sky and the sun lit up its underside, I saw it was a Red Kite. It decided against a fight, and hitched a thermal up to the next level of sky, eventually vanishing over the trees to the South. I watched it for around five minutes.

That's the first time I have ever seen a Red Kite in this area. Not so long ago, they were 'endangered', and I can remember visiting Gigrin Farm near Rhayader about ten years ago to watch them feeding these 'amazingly rare' birds. At that time, you could also see the birds in the wild at Bwlch Nant Yr Arian, on the A44 Aberystwyth to Llangurig road, if you were patient and lucky. Now, they are almost common in mid-Wales, although I believe they are still rare elsewhere in the UK.

I know it was a Red Kite because when we were up in mid-Wales on Sunday we stopped for a break at the reservoir of Llyn Brianne. D2 spotted a bird wheeling over the water and asked what it was. The general consensus was that it was a Red Kite, and we spent several minutes watching it circling. From my memories of Gigrin, I was sure it wasn't a Red Kite, so I made a careful mental note of the markings and when I got home I checked it in my birdwatching book. Sure enough, it was a Red Kite. So when I saw the bird this morning, there was no mistake. The orange underparts, the white wing-patches and the shape of the tail were all quite distinctive.



We have several breeding pairs of Common Buzzards in the woods round here, and it is wonderful to watch them on a warm summer's day, wheeling round in the sky and uttering that strange whistling screech. I like them, even though they are a bit thuggish. They are also clever: their natural food is small mammals, caught from the open fields, but one has taken to sitting on a telegraph pole on the other side of the valley, watching for roadkill. I pass it most mornings. Why make the effort to chase it, if it will eventually be given to you on a plate?



But Red Kites in the area ... now that's something.

Not my photos, by the way. Thank you birdwatchireland.ie (Buzzard) and northernkites.org.uk (Red Kite).

Morning visitors

Some thoughts on the Royle Weeding later, but this morning as I was having breakfast by the window, I saw a family of Goldcrest having theirs on the lawn. We get a lot of starlings and jackdaws here, and the standard-issue thrushes and blackbirds, but these little critters were remarkable for their tininess and the remarkably bold colouring of the head stripes. There were five in all, spread out among the dandelions and daisies. I got some binoculars to make a firm identification, but by the time I had dug the big camera out from the pile of rubbish on the spare bed, they had cleared the lawn of spiders, wiped their beaks and had gone. So you will have to make the best of a library picture.



And I'm going to mow the lawn to leave a clear view and park the Nikon (with 210mm long lens) on standby for tomorrow.