Chiltern Birder

For a variety of reasons I have only been putting out fat blocks this winter. In the recent very cold weather there has been a total lack of birds in the garden. One bright spot this morning was a wren hopping into the ivy at one corner of the back wall. This is the first wren that I have seen in the garden for quite a while. On Christmas day I had to drive over to Essex for a family visit and was lucky to get a glimpse of a fieldfare on the bushes by the Magic Roundabout in Hemel. Before Christmas I was in Thame and there were about a dozen kites over the town. The concentration of kites over inhabited areas in the snow was quite striking.

While driving to Essex yesterday afternoon I was suprised to see a kite over the A414 on the outskirts of Hemel just before reaching the motorway. I remarked to my passenger that this was my most easterly sighting of a kite. A few minutes later, about a third of the way down the M10 I saw another large bird of prey. It had the feel of a kite although I have only seen buzzards around there in the past. However it came back across the road giving an excellend view of the forked tail and the plumage. For so long the kites only seemed to fly to the west of the escarpment but now its nice to see them coming so far east.