It's now technically spring, but still cool and mostly grey with a light north-easterly. I decided to return to the Preston Bagot area to follow up my suspicion that there is a small heronry there.
For me, there are several essentials when I go birding; binoculars (check), camera (check), map (check), pencil (check), notebook .....aah, oops. I hate forgetting it, but I was too far from home to turn back. I managed to make some notes on my phone, but its not the same.
Anyway, I soon had a bit of good luck. A Sparrowhawk was standing in a field, quite close to where I came upon it, and amazingly waited while I mucked about getting my camera out, and fiddling with various settings.
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| Sparrowhawk |
Although it is quite a brown bird, it looked quite small, so maybe it was a young male. I thought it might have made a kill, but there was no evidence of that, so perhaps it just took pity on me.
Anyway, I arrived where I thought the heronry might be, and established that I had been right. There were three visible nests at the top of a stand of conifers. I was quite chuffed as this was the third heronry within a ten kilometre radius of where I live.
Later on I spotted a Red Kite, maybe the bird I saw not far away on my last visit to this area. At the time I was chatting to two ladies who, despite not carrying binoculars, greeted me with "Have you come to see the heronry?" Well that deflated my ego a bit. Not a new find at all. However, one of the ladies, Jane E, turned out to be an active BTO member and clearly knew her birds. She said she understood there were 19 nests!
It turned out that she was talking about a different heronry in a private wood not too far away from my discovery. I will need to try to get permission to visit it in order to bump my count up to four local heronries.
So after a pretty dodgy start, it was a most enjoyable morning. There is obviously plenty of scope for further study around here.
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