Birding Can Be A Tricky Peregrine! Early March 2021

March marks the beginning of spring, the days lengthen and the birds begin to sing. Towards the end of the month spring migrant birds appear heralding the main influx of our summer breeding birds during April and May. Seeing your first Wheatear or Swallow of the year is one of the joys of birding and for a keen year lister like myself, eagerly anticipated. But it seems that some people are far too eager and every year reports will come in of birds seen in March that are largely, if not exclusively, still south of the Sahara in Africa. Early March reports of Cuckoos for instance generally relate to the call of a Collared Dove or of a Sparrowhawk hurtling past at distance (a mistake I've been guilty of making in the past when I had less experience). Another oft reported bird in March is the Hobby, a medium sized Falcon that spends our winter months in the southern parts of Africa where there are plenty of Dragonflies, their main food, and Hirundines which they are adept at catching. However the mean arrival date for Hobby in Oxfordshire, is around April the 20th, so any reports of them in early March or at any time before mid-April is almost certainly down to misidentification of similar Birds of Prey such as Sparrowhawk, Merlin, or most likely Peregrine Falcon. I always find it very interesting that none of the early sightings are ever reported by seasoned birders, a large proportion of whom carry cameras, but always by more casual observers. If a photo is obtained it always seems to be a blurry distant image from which it's impossible to identify the bird or, if the image is good enough, the bird manifests itself as a Peregrine or similar but never a Hobby. There's a good reason that Hobbies are not seen here until April and that is because there is little they could eat until then. Hirundines, Martins and Swallows have yet to arrive in numbers and UK Dragonflies and the like have yet to emerge. Hobbies follow the Hirundines as they migrate up Africa and into Europe, akin to taking your larder with you. The pastime and activity of Birding really can be a difficult Peregrine sometimes!

We began March as we had spent a lot of late February by returning again to the secret corner of Oxfordshire where the secret birds can be seen, provided you know where they are. Unfortunately there were a few other folk there who had also discovered the secret place, maybe it's no longer the big secret it once was, so because of the Lockdown guidelines we didn't stay more than five minutes owing to restrictions on numbers of people gathering in the same place and I didn't fancy passing go and have to stump up two lots of two hundred quid! Besides it was misty so there wouldn't be much value in hanging around. Instead we drove to a nearby wood, which could be considered as an equally big secret because hardly anybody ever goes there. Within the wood is another secret area that is known, to a lucky few, as a site to see Woodcock, except that seeing Woodcock isn't that easy unless watching them on their summer roding flights. We had already tried to see a Woodcock and failed a couple of weeks before. Having slogged through ankle deep mud to reach the outer limits of the trees we entered the bracken covered area where the Woodcocks are purported to spend the day roosting on the ground. I immediately felt guilty because "kicking birds up" is not my favoured way of seeing any bird species and so I resisted the time old method of walking noisily through the vegetation making as much noise as possible with the aim of flushing a bird, and instead walked slowly along the many deer trails that traverse through the bracken. I stopped frequently and scanned ahead and to the sides, on top of the bracken, under the bracken, under fallen trees, in tangles of brambles, hoping that I'd find a resting Woodcock. After an hour of neither finding a Woodcock or inadvertently flushing one I gave up. Then, almost unbelievably, only ten feet away from the edge of the wood and right next to the main track, a Woodcock suddenly erupted from a previously flattened (by somebody else I hasten to add) patch of bracken, it must have been sat on top of it, and flew slowly, leisurely enough that had I been ready then I would have captured a few images but I wasn't, off to another part of the wood. Once again I had forgotten the old adages of "never give up" and "expect the unexpected at all times" when birding. The Woodcock was species #114 on the Old Caley Year List.

Woodcock, Scotland, June 2011

We returned clandestinely to the secret place and were pleased to find that we had the place to ourselves, obviously the misty conditions had meant for a no show from the desired birds. It must have been our lucky day though since in the next half hour we had several views of what we wanted. Later that day we staked out a Barn Owl roost that we'd been told about for almost two hours to see a Barnie that was sure to be "hunting in daylight" since it had been on every day for the last two weeks. This day was clearly its day off though because it never appeared and must have remained in its roosting hole, if it was even in the hole in the first place. The following day a friend of mine also visited the site and the Barn Owl put on an awesome display for him. Perhaps we weren't so lucky after all.

With a mixed weather forecast we stayed local for the weekend of the 6-7th, spending a pleasant few hours on the Saturday morning walking in North Oxfordshire farmland, not seeing too much but it was good to be alone together (oxymoron) away from everything. We are blessed to have a few Corn Buntings locally and we found a small flock perched in a distant bush. Corn Buntings are very late breeders so in March are still in flocks which makes them very hard to approach. Birds in groups are always much more flighty and wary than single birds and despite me trying to be extremely stealthy, I failed to get any close shots.

Corn Bunting

Skylarks are also reasonably common in our area despite a large proportion of their fields being concreted over as the unstoppable Bicester tsunami flattens everything in its path. It makes my blood boil when I read the developers lies of how they make their new housing estates "wildlife friendly" and how they incorporate important "nature refuges" within the sites. I personally think wide open naturalised farmland hedges and grassy fields were far better before giving way to urban sprawl and I believe the wildlife would prefer the same rather than being hemmed into small corners between the houses where they have to contend with a never-ending cavalcade of dog walkers, joggers and other intrusions. We stopped to admire a Skylark feeding on the rough path ahead, soon to be "improved" into a new road, built so that trucks can access the railway when construction begins on another great human idea that nobody actually wants except for a wealthy few that largely only see wildlife as being in the way of progress, or as food, or as vermin, or worse still, as fun to kill. It is actually hard to walk anywhere around my local area these days without seething. I need a lie down.

Skylark

My mood was lightened a touch by hearing the gentle and plaintive characteristic song of a Yellowhammer, a countryside speciality which will also find no home amongst ordered streets and houses of newly built estates. We need to enjoy these birds to the full while we still can. The Yellowhammer, on its own and not in a flock, was much easier to approach and posed beautifully for me showing its lovely plumage mix of yellow and rusty red.

Yellowhammer

Late in the afternoon, Justin a fellow Bicester birder, called me to say that he had found an interesting cold-grey-brown coloured Chiffchaff at our local Bicester Wetlands Reserve. I knew that he didn't want me there to help identify the bird, which he suspected could be a Siberian Chiffchaff, because he knows as well as I do that my own skills at identification are not top rate but rather because I am capable of grabbing photos when needed to! So fifteen minutes after his call, Mrs Caley and I joined him behind the workmen's compound, there is massive redevelopment of the adjacent sewage works taking place (no part of Bicester is free from some type of building work nowadays), to view the scrub there. Luckily Justin had the Chiffchaff in question in his sights and so I was able to quickly locate it and fire off some shots.

(Just a Common) Chiffchaff

The Chiffchaff, one of several there, was indeed a drab grey-brown colour and also very uniformly coloured as opposed to the greeny-yellow tinged  plumage of the Common Chiffchaffs that it accompanied. I don't have a lot of experience of Siberian Chiffchaff but remembered that they usually have obviously contrasting wings which this bird didn't appear to have. To be fair none of us knew whether or not the bird was the genuine article. I took more photos.

We sent some of the photos off to a few eminent Oxon birders and the waited for the conclusions. The consensus when it came was that the bird was just a Common Chiffchaff. A few features didn't fit for a true "tristis", like that absence of a different wing colour (although as the shot below shows there was a hint of yellow-green) and the lack of an all black bill, plus the supercilium revealed a tinge of yellow that it shouldn't have, and the vent area was buff rather than white. But still, it was certainly an interesting bird and definitely appeared different to the attendant "colybita" birds even it was in fact one of the same. Maybe it was from further north and east and was actually of the subspecies "abietinus". Confused? I am! When birding gets down to the nitty gritty details then I tend to go and hide under the bed covers so am fairly useless in such matters. Thank goodness I have birding friends, they know who they are, who absolutely revel in the finer points of bird identification. I don't have the patience or the memory retention for it. What was it I was saying again?

So to Sunday, which dawned miserable and wet, so we took advantage of that and did absolutely nothing all day until late afternoon. I'm not good at staying in all day at any time so by mid-afternoon was positively pulling my hair out to get out the door. It's partly the reason why I'm almost as bald as a Coot these days and wearing a lot of hats. The sun had come out by three o'clock so we drove back to the Barn Owl site where we had failed a few days before. The roosting tree was beautifully illuminated by the afternoon sun but there was no sign of the Owl at all. We had been told that on such sunny afternoons the Barn Owl was prone to doing a bit of sunbathing, that is perching half in and half out of the hole and soaking up some rays. At least the sun kept us a bit warmer on what was generally a pretty cold day. We stood, party concealed by a hedge about eighty metres away from the tree, and waited. And waited. By quarter to five the sun was just about to disappear behind a low hill, the slight warmth to the day would go with it, and still there was no sign of the Barn Owl. We started the old worry sequence once again, "Is the Owl even in there?". Then just as we our attention was becoming less focussed, we had been staring at the tree for over an hour, a glance at the tree revealed a white shape peeking out over the brim of the hole. Holding our breath we watched the Barn Owl expose its head to the elements, take a quick look around and then retreat back to the hole again! Not quite ready to seize the day.

Barn Owl

It was another twenty minutes, when the sun had disappeared behind the hill, until the Barn Owl "up periscoped" again. Although we were now shivering in the shade, the tree was still beautifully illuminated so when the Owl decided it was time to leave the hole and jump onto a branch for a stretch we were treated to outstanding views despite the distance between us and the tree.

The Barn Owl spent five minutes surveying its patch. It no doubt clocked us and the dog walker on the opposite hillside. A small party of Jackdaws had flown into the tree as soon as the Owl had emerged from the hole but kept a respectful distance away. Lots of head bobbing ensued, that strange behaviour that many birds exhibit to presumably gain the distance and accurate location of things around them. Birds know every inch of their territory and will notice anything that has changed since they last looked. And of course, Barn Owls have superb hearing as well as sight so "our" bird would be checking the ambient sounds too. Once all the checks had been done the Barn Owl felt reassured enough to bounce up the tree and select a more exposed perch. For once the rich warm evening light helped me to get some decent images.

Then almost half an hour after it first looked out of the tree hole the Barn Owl rewarded our patience by hopping out of the tree and by flying, the wrong way! Thanks a bunch! The Owl had chosen to hunt the strip of rough grass left for it at the side of the field to the right of the tree as we looked at it. We watched the Owl until it was reduced to a mere speck in the distance. We reasoned though that the Owl was sure to return because to our immediate left and right were two rough parcels of ground set on the small hillside. There are other suitable places nearby that an Owl could also hunt and that we couldn't see from our vantage point but we had seen a few good photos of the Owl taken by some friends of it hunting on the hillside where we stood. It took another five minutes of waiting before we spotted the Barn Owl returning by the way it had gone. I armed myself ready for a glorious flyby just as the Owl suddenly veered right across the field and disappeared behind a hedge. This Owl wasn't playing very nicely at all. A few seconds on though we saw the Owl fly over the gateway that we had walked though earlier and fly towards us. Problem now of course was that the hillside was cast in the evening shadows.

One of the surprising things about a Barn Owl is how fast they fly when quartering the ground in their search for prey. They don't have the patient fluttery moth-like flight of the Short-eared Owl or Hen Harrier and are much more direct, perhaps because they have almost silent flight and rely more on hearing than sight to locate the Voles and other Rodents that they eat. The Barn Owl whistled silently (oxymoron), past us and over the hedge towards the hill and another rough strip of grass. Now what remained of the light was totally against us so the Owl was a silhouette almost as it veered just under the crest of the hill. Just for a few seconds though it did find a small shaft of sunlight which helped me get a couple of more atmospheric shots, backlit for added effect.

The Barn Owl made several stoops to the ground but didn't appear to snare anything. After one dive into the grass it looked directly at us, as if to say, "I can't catch Voles every time you know". It landed temporarily on a fallen tree and again glanced back in our direction. It wasn't looking at us of course, except to maybe reaffirm that there were strangers in its territory, but was probably listening for the noises made by its prey.

We were treated to one direct flight towards us when the Owl was at last lit up by the weakening sunshine before it disappeared away down the field again. It was getting dark and increasingly cold so we called it a day and headed back towards the car, some half a mile away. I had an idea that the Barn Owl would be hunting the rough hillside back towards the village and sure enough I found it stood on top of one of the many posts at the top of the rise. It had seen me first though so was off flying again before I had the chance to take further photos. It had taken two visits and a fair bit of waiting around but we had been treated to our best views of a Barnie for a few years so walked back extremely pleased.

The next day I noticed that the first report of a Hobby for 2021 was posted on local social media. No photo to accompany the report of course so I doubt very much that the county recorder will be too keen to log it.