Slightly Cuckoo

Sue thinks I’m daft, slightly cuckoo even for spending so much time birding and ringing, even in the most off-putting weather. But occasionally the unpromising days turn out to be actually not bad, just like this afternoon when I took a trip out Nateby way after the morning rain had cleared even though the cloud remained and the stiff breeze still blew from the west.

After many years of carefully nurturing the farmer, I am ok to take my car down his track, a ploy that worked well when I found what I thought to be the Cuckoo of last week, some way off from the original spot. The Cuckoo didn’t take too much notice of the car halfway through the field gate, enabling me to get a few more pictures

Cuckoo
Cuckoo
Cuckoo

Cuckoo
After a few minutes I realised there was actually not one but two Cuckoos, having a bit of a Barney over possession of the good feeding they had found, but keeping a respectable distance from each other until their paths crossed. The few distant shots below are the best I could get of their squabbles where they appeared to employ their red juvenile gapes in threat posturing. It’s rare enough to see a single Cuckoo nowadays so I was doubly lucky to witness this behaviour.

Cuckoo
Cuckoo

After a while I left the Cuckoos, parked up the car out of tractor’s harm and took a walk where things got even better when a Swallow hunting Hobby came close by. Not unusually it was the Swallows that drew attention to the raptor with their twittering alarm calls; I watched as the Hobby continued towards Nateby village, disrupting more Swallows feeding around the next farm buildings before it was lost to view.

Hobby

Following those events it was hard to concentrate or better the day but I also saw 6 Whitethroats, 3 Buzzards, 1 Kestrel and 80+ Swallows, then 6 Swift heading south.

Buzzard
On my way home I promised Farmer Philip a picture of the Cuckoo if there was a reasonable one. Philip hadn’t seen or heard a Cuckoo on his land for several years.

Cuckoo
Cuckoo

It's That Hobby Again

It was another snatched hour or two when in between rain showers I ventured down to the local patch Pilling shore. I wanted to take a look on this the highest tide for a week or two, where I hoped for a few early autumn waders or whatever else might come along.

First off were the Lane Ends Reed Warblers, two of them singing below the car park, but not much else apart from the building numbers of Greylag on the pool and the shore, 31 of them today. The walk to Pilling water yielded the usual Kestrel, a singing Meadow Pipit and couple of Skylarks. The Kestrel sat about near the pool, and so did I, but on the stile as the grass was soaked from a previous shower. I found the four Common Sandpipers along the outflow, unwilling as ever to come close so I settled down and counted the 550 Curlew and 110 Lapwings, the most numerous and obvious birds until the tide runs in a little more.

Kestrel
Curlew

I really couldn’t believe it, but it happened again, the same Hobby from 12 days ago or a new Hobby, cruising over the incoming tide as it scattered the birds below on the marsh. I made the elementary mistake of taking my eye off the bird as I fiddled with the camera in the belief I could lock onto the Hobby again, but I couldn’t and it disappeared.

Hobby

The Hobby is real mystery bird up here, a will-o’-the-wisp thing, here one minute gone the next. I was left wondering about the influx to the UK in early July, the one I saw on July 2nd and the one or two extra ones that suddenly appeared in Lancashire without any obvious reason or explanation.

I settled down again maybe knowing that if the Hobby came back the birds on the shore would know before me and alert me accordingly. I counted the Black-headed Gulls coming and going from the sub-roost and spotted an adult Mediterranean Gull heading off towards Lane Ends and eventually probably Bank End where the gulls settle on the higher tides. There were groups of Dunlin going to and fro, circling and calling, settling occasionally on the margins of the marsh which allowed me a count of 80, but apart from 20 or so Redshank, I didn’t see much wader variety.

Dunlin
Dunlin

Terns sometimes appear at the Pilling Water roost, usually at or just after high tide when they follow the tide into the bay from Knott End way. That's how it was today when 2 Common Tern flew in to settle down on the outer marsh until the tide dropped.

Common Tern

I had watched the dark grey clouds head in from the south, and jacketless as the rain thundered down I put a roof over my head in the birder’s shelter for a while. It was temporary only as the rain continued and I headed back to the car, wet but happy that my hobby is so rewarding.

Birder’s Shelter

It's Just A Hobby

I did a few jobs yesterday and combined it with the babysitting, so after the warm southerlies of the last few days and the arrival of July this morning I treated myself to a little birding. It started as an ordinary morning walk without too many expectations, then as often happens, the unexpected materialises, my familiar walk got more and more interesting until it finished with a special bird.

As I arrived at Lane Ends about 80 Curlew came off the inland fields, flew over the plantation and landed out on the marsh where they joined the autumn gang of 120 or so Lapwings. The walk up to Pilling Water proved uneventful with just the usual Skylarks for company as I cursed the early morning brightly clothed walkers for beating me to the pool again, but it was 9am I suppose.

Sat on the stile I noticed a scruffy looking Barn Owl hunting the fields and ditches alongside Fluke Hall Lane and the margins of Pilling Water. At that hour on a bright sunny it could only be hunting for food for youngsters, and I watched it for about 15 minutes alternately quartering the ground or sitting on the lookout fence posts. It was very scruffy, but I suppose I might be if I had been sat on eggs in the confines of a dark smelly box for some weeks. In actual fact there is nothing quite like the smell of an end of season owl box full of growing young with their left overs of discarded and rotting food items and sometimes the left overs of the smallest owl eaten a week or two before by its larger siblings.

Barn Owl
Barn Owl

That brightened my first hour or so before the owl flew off towards Fluke Hall, but it was so quiet I could hear a Whitethroat singing from the distant sewage works at Damside. Back at the sea wall end I noted 2 Common Sandpipers along the outfall and a lone Golden Plover, with 9 Pied Wagtails scattered across the marsh with small groups of Linnets that totalled up to a miserly 14 birds. A Meadow Pipit has started singing again at the junction of the sea wall there, and I am sure there is a nest close by as it let me approach it fairly close while calling to its mate. I noticed it had a ring on the right leg but it is more than a few years since I ringed any “mipits” just there, so I need either to carry a scope or catch the bird with meal worms to find out its place of ringing.

Meadow Pipit

A Grey Heron sat along the inland dyke where Swallows and House Martins fed. From the stile I was fairly certain that besides the local hirundines, other Swallows and House Martins were on the move south, with a single Sand Martin joining in the feeding out over the marsh, with Swifts noted here as going west and numbering 40, Swallows 70 and House Martins 30. The resident breeding Redshanks and Lapwings still protested at my presence even though they had obviously moved their young further out on the marsh, so I tried my hand at Redshanks photos again, but the results weren’t as good as a few days ago.

Redshank

At Lane Ends car park I dumped my heavy camera bag in the car to watch the seeming inactivity out on the marsh. As Lapwings and Starlings mixed in the summery length grass I waited to count them, concentrating instead on the numbers of Swifts flying at all heights but mainly heading west with more Swallows and extra House Martins. Something spooked the Lapwings and Starlings into the air “en masse”, the regular autumn/winter Merlin or Peregrine, but early I supposed. Then an adult Hobby came fairly slowly from the right along the sea wall in front of the mound, pursued and almost surrounded by complaining Swifts and Swallows, then disappeared behind the plantation with an entourage of twittering birds. By now I revised my morning count of Swift to 90, Swallow to 80 and House Martin to 45. My Starling count was 240, Lapwing 170. Hobby isn’t a major rarity here, in fact they do breed in Lancashire but it’s always a special day when one surprises you unexpectedly.

Hobby

Although everything went quiet I waited for a while to see if the Hobby might reappear. After about twenty minutes the Lapwings, Starlings and hirundines spooked again as the Hobby came in from the direction of Fluke Hall at a much faster pace, did a Swift impression, then continued off towards Cockerham where I lost it in the sky.

That’s a good morning’s birding, and it was 1130 already. How time flies when we’re having fun.

More From Menorca

The weather in Menorca was fairly mixed, about 50% pure sunny weather and 50% cloudy, cool or even rain, not ideal for photography a lot of the time but ok for walking and bit of birding, especially during the first week when migration was best but perhaps not dramatic due to the constant northerly winds.

One of our favourite walks was east from Sant Tomas, up over the coastal headland and then inland towards Son Bou where the Cami de Cavalls took us alongside woodland, across the mouth of the gorge that drops down from Es Mijorn, then alongside the marsh stretched out inland of the beach leading west from Son Bou; a mixture of habitats reflected in the birds seen. The frustrating birds are the Cettis Warblers and Nightingales, constantly singing from seemingly every suitable patch of habitat, hardly seen and almost impossible to photograph on a casual basis.

Alongside the coastal paths Wheatears, Stonechats, Tawny Pipits, Linnets and Goldfinches were plentiful, with pairs of Blue Rock Thrushes spaced at suitable distances apart, with an accompanying and constant rise and fall of Zitting Cisticolas. Shore and seabirds seen on this walk were the by now common Audouin’s Gull, Shag, Yellow-legged Gull and Common Sandpiper, and further out over the sea, feeding shearwaters, both Cory’s, Yelkouan and probably Balearic but all fairly distant on a walk without the encumbrance of heavy telescopes. It was the 3rd of May that saw an influx of Woodchat Shrikes that shared the tall hedgerows and coastal scrub with the finches, chats, pipits, and later in the week Spotted Flycatchers. It is not until I tried to get pictures of Woodchat Shrikes that I realised how difficult they are to approach closely, as they always kept a respectable distance, ever alert to my movements. Corn Buntings are just everywhere on Menorca, perhaps vying with Sardinian Warbler for the title of “commonest passerine”, and there are just so many singing from every available song post that it made me think how common the species must have been in the UK many, many moons ago before intensification.

Tawny Pipit
Blue Rock Thrush
Stonechat
Spotted Flycatcher
Corn Bunting
Woodchat Shrike
Audouin’s Gull
Raptors on this walk reflected the most common ones of the island, Egyptian Vulture, Kestrel, Peregrine and Booted Eagle, but there was usually a chance of a Hobby where migrant Swallows, Swift and House Martins congregated high along the cliffs or low over the marsh.

Hobby
Egyptian Vulture
View To Son Benet
In the area of Son Bou marsh we saw Squacco, Grey and Purple Herons and the ubiquitous Little Egrets, Purple Swamphens, Coots and Moorhens with the occasional Marsh Harrier, but struggled to see the Great Reed Warblers or evn the Little Bittern from previous years.

Purple Heron
Maybe another walk, another day at Another Bird Blog but there is always a Menorcan sunset to admire.

Sundown at Sant Tomas