Buzzard behaviour

The close Buzzard portrait above was taken during a two hour encounter with what looked like a fairly young bird that had picked up on the amount of frogs and toads that were crawling and swimming around at Marazion marsh looking for mates this morning,

The bird stayed low to the ground using various fence posts and RSPB marker posts as vantage points which allowed me plenty of opportunities for close working low level portraits

I watched the bird take and dispatch several frogs as it made short ground level attacks from the posts

This was my closest shot taken at my minimum eight metre to infinity focal range setting while the bird was preoccupied hunting in the reeds

This behaviour went on for nearly two hours by which time the buzzard was beginning to look quite bloated

Just one more frog to dispatch and the buzzard had eaten its fill and it departed to the high pine tree woods at the back of the marsh leaving me with the best buzzard behaviour sequences that I had taken  in a while.

The Rock Hopper & the Glider

THE ROCK HOPPER 

This Grey Heron surprised me when it landed on the unlikely edge of a razor sharp rock on the clifftop about a hundred metres in front of me as I walked the coast path,

It watched me as I slowly moved forward until I was to close for its comfort zone when it turned and made a very graceful hop onto the next sharp rock along the cliff,

Very nicely done for such a lanky bird but only a metre gained in distance between us,  As I walked on towards the heron, it finally got the message and dropped off of the second rock to fly down the cliff face to the waterline below leaving me with an interesting set of images.

THE GLIDER

Further on along the coastline this fine buzzard passed over me twice in the space of a few minutes,  It maintained a height or around  thirty metres above the clifftop footpath and it never made a single wing beat during either pass or onwards as it continued until out of sight along the coastline,  What a way to travel !!

Peregrine with prey

When I arrived on the south coast this morning I could see that the Peregrine had already eaten and one bird was reaching open mouthed to regurgitate indigestible waste,  The second bird came in with more prey offerings but the first was obviously still not capable of eating more so that too went off to be stashed for later.  It was good to see that the pair had bonded well and obviously the male was well capable of supplying the female through the oncoming nesting season.

Half an hour later the male Peregrine returned to the cliffs with another gory looking half eaten larger carcass but that was refused as well so it too was taken off to the same stash site as the first offering,

Rising up from the stash this busy bird circled around a few time perhaps considering going hunting again but it eventually decided to wait and glided gracefully back into a favoured cliff ledge to relax in the sunshine for a while.

I moved on along the coast looking for early Adders that might be tempted out to bask in the warm sunshine but today was not to be the day for my first 2018 sighting.

Stithians southern cut off today

It was good to be out and about on a lovely sunny but cold day at Stithians southern cut off hide today and I was pleased to record my first female Brambling image of the year posted below thanks to the eagle eye of Hilary Mayes

The feeders were very busy with small birds including several raiding parties of  Long Tailed Tits and Goldfinches and I was treated to a nice take-off sequence to merge by the resident female Great Spotted Woodpecker

 All to soon it was time to head off home to do battle with a new desktop computer and lots of new software so this blog might be a little late on posting tonight !!

Marazion Marsh

I called in at Marazion Marsh on a bright but cold and windy afternoon yesterday to find some of the resident birds showing in the sunshine which has been a bit thin on the ground of late,  A fine Grey Heron was fishing along the reed waterline which always makes a good background,  A family of five Canada geese were feeding on the warren grasses and a few ducks were feeding on the water,

There were a couple of volunteers from the RSPB doing a good job of clearing and burning reeds a little further along the marsh but this tends to be a kiss of death to most wildlife sightings during the time that the work party lasts,

The almost tame Rabbits on the warren took little notice and carried on doing what Rabbits do best !!

After a while an immaculate looking Heron Gull flew in to the water line with a very grizzly looking fish head in its mouth that was covered in sand from the adjacent beach,  It dropped the head in the fresh water then skilfully shook the sand off, turned it mouth on and down the hatch it went with the bird looking well pleased with its find which was probably not the first or last time that it will complete this exercise  A quick wash and brush up to remove sand from its plumage and this immaculate bird was on its way back to the beach looking for another one

Grey Heron's skillful decent

While I was watching the Peregrine in the previous blog yesterday, A Grey Heron glided out from above the 50m cliffs that they were perched on and started to make a slow declining circuit down towards the water level below,

Its slow decent suddenly became a tight vertical spiral of just a couple of metres with the Heron dropping like a stone and I was not quick enough to catch the spiral action or pinpoint the Peregrine locations and I wondered if the Heron had just seen them or perhaps experienced attacks from the Peregrine that were intently watching it on previous occasions.

The Heron stalled its fall within a few metres of the shoreline as shown in the montage image above and opted to fly out over the water several metres to a single rock that was projecting above the waterline,   This once again seemed like a repeated defence tactic as Peregrine do not like ending up struggling with their prey in or over the water,

The Heron settled down as did the Peregrine both of which had taken prey in the previous hour anyway,

The images posted below were all used to produce the flight sequence montage posted above,