Chiltern Birder

It is a curious morning, one minute the starlings will be waking the dead, the next there will not be a bird to be seen at the front or the back. During one of the quiet spells I did hear a single call from a greater spotted woodpecker and managed to get just a glimpse as it flew away from the quince tree in the front garden. I had thought that the starlings had driven him off entirely, luckily not. Apart from the starlings the goldfinches now seem to be the most common visitors to the feeders. The chaffinces and tits are far less common that I would expect.

The starlings are as noisy as ever. It is difficult to assess numbers as they seem to have divided themselves between the fat feeders at the front and back of the house. This seems to have frightened off the Greater Spotted Woodpecker who was visiting earlier in the year. I haven't seen any greens recently but hear them regularly. This morning I had a juvenile goldfinch on the seed feeder, which is a first, at least when I have been around. Its hardly worth logging kite sightings locally these days but, as a driver, I found the one circling low over Ley Hill cricket ground rather distracting as I drove home.

On Bank Holiday Monday, driving between Ducklington and Aston in Oxfordshire I had my most westerly sighting of a red kite so far. I have seen buzzards often enough west of Oxford but never a kite. There was a deer carcass beside the road about a mile further on. I don't know if it was intentionally heading for it but it was flying steadily in one direction not circling as they usually do. I had a better look at the carcass driving back that evening and it had been well picked over with the ribs showing. A few miles down the road in Bampton the swifts were very noisy but it seemed to be the same small party of about eight chasing each others tails around the village.

Just after uploading the previous post I opened the front door and heard a cuckoo for the first time this year. Considering that I heard him about a fortnight earlier last year I suspect that I just haven't been listening at the right times.

The starlings are working through the fat bars at quite a rate now. Last night I put in a 1 litre bar in the back garden and a 300 gram cake in the front. The cake was gone by 10am and the bar by late afternoon. Some of the chicks are feeding themselves but some stand on top of the fat bar with their mouths open! Luckily this season is short although intense. From previous years blogs I see that the chicks arrive about this week each year. I will spend a fortune on fat for about three weeks then they will probably move on during late June and early July.

The first starling chick has appeared at the feeders. For a change this has been at the fat block hung from the quince in the front garden. The starlings have really taken to this and seem to have driven off the woodpecker. At the back the usual birds come and go with beaks stuffed with food. I imagine that in a few days the starling chicks will turn up and start waking me up well before the alarm goes. I had to drive down to Burnham near Slough yesterday morning. The kites were in evidence in the vicinity of the M40 at Beaconsfield. Not unusual these days but it had me thinking of the difference since I worked on the Trading Estate at Slough 12 years ago. It was nice to hear a few swifts in the air at Burnham. I may just not have been looking in the right places but I don't seem to have seen as many swifts, swallows or martins as I would expect normally.

Once so common but now a remarkable rarity where I live, I had a pair of house sparrows come to the seed feeders today. When I first started regular bird feeding nearly 30 years ago I never thought that I would be considering a goldfinch or a red kite as more commonplace than a sparrow! Another nice site yesterday was seeing a lapwing in flight from the M25 near Clacket Lane Services. From the way it was flying I think something had disturbed its nest.

I made a trip to the Gower last weekend. Not primarily for birding but with a few interesting sightings all the same. As I didn't have a field guide with me it also revealed the gaps in my knowledge primiarily about warblers and pipets. We saw quite a few but as to which species that's another matter. Among the dunes there were a lot of skylarks and also some lapwings, obviously close to a nest. On a more rocky shore there were some ringed plovers. One confusing sight was a pied wagtail perched on a wire. With the tail hanging down the whole look of the bird is different and I had to look twice to make an identification.