Effort and Reward

Friday started off innocuously enough - overcast, not too hot, nice breeze... I check the computermabob and see nowt going on, and decide to be good and get some exercise by giving the patch the bashing of it's life. Three and a half hours of bashing later, the sun has come out and it's swelteringly humid with it. Ouch.

I covered a lot of ground, including bits I don't usually bother with where there are rich old people who stare at you. I smile at them. :D You may have noticed I've not mentioned birds yet. This is for good reason, as I saw bugger all 'special' or even 'noteworthy'. Best I can say is a half dozen Gannets flying about over the sea [not even fishing] and several broods of recently fledged Blue Tits [I dare any of you not to go "Awww....." at ickle baby Blue Tits!].

With a warm evening of light winds forecast, I'm intending to go look for some Nightjars, and while I wait for it to get a bit darker, I get back online and discover what everyone else has been doing.... Within a half hour I'm up at Exminster, but of the Falcon there is no sign [or of any other birders, for that matter]. I did meet a Fox, who seemed rather brassed off to see me ["Haven't you all gone yet? Don't you know what time it is?" etc...], so that was two of us vexed.

Then, the wind turned out to be less light than I expected - Nightjars there were, churring away nicely, but they kept low and didn't display, so only a few brief glimpses were had. I'll be back.

So, a day of effort without much reward. I'm not complaining - you put the hours in and sometimes you get something Wow! back, but mostly you just put the hours in. Its not without merit, certainly not without fun.

Ahem. I'm going off on a tangent again.

Today I had arranged an arrangement with Joe "It's a full and manly goatee" Ray - if he got positive news on the Red-foot, I'd give him a lift over so we could see it. Morning was pushing towards afternoon before I got the call and he dragged his backside out of bed [well, he is a teenager... ;) ]. Exminster was blazing hot [26 degrees, no less] and as we made our way along the railway path we soon discovered that the bird was feeling elusive...

Fortunately that changed rapidly - a falcon hawking insects more or less above the lagoon proved to be the Red-footed Falcon, and we proceeded to enjoy more than an hour of it first up high, then down low, then up high again! :) The desert-level heat haze made a watercolour of it when it perched on posts, hawthorns, and sticks next to hawthorns - proper focus only possible when clouds obscured the sun - but some of the flight views, especially when it gave us a pretty close low level flypast, were excellent.

Its a truly lovely bird - a real pleasure to watch and very educational too; especially when hawking up high with a Hobby or two for company. The flight silhouette and action are quite Kestrel and Hobby-ish [first two things it was thought to be when we picked it up before the sun caught that creamy orange crown] - but it pulled some very impressive aerobatics of a sharpness I've never seen a Hobby manage. Looking back to the Haldon falcon sp.? Yeah, I think it probably was one... Back to Her Ladyship; This is a bird which looks radically different in different light situations; against bright sky its dark with the pale cap sticking out especially when the bird is head-on; flying low its colouring reminds you of of all things a male Marsh Harrier; perched [at least to me] its coloured a bit like a Lammergeier. From the brown sheen to its grey upperparts I reckon its a 2cy - though a nice close un-hazed view of it perched would help to be sure.

Ok, enough burbling on about cute ickle falcons and how adorably they munch dragonflies....