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    Cheers Amor and AH - my main disappointment with the photo is that it's blurred, cos I just fired up the camera and took the shot on whatever shutter speed it was set at from the last usage.

    Dug out a couple more airborne efforts from last year - bird table wars.



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      Left my family skiing this morning and set off into the forested mountains for a hike. Very icy, ultimately not as satisfying as hoped - as a hike. Made up for, however, by seeing an owl swoop directly across my path as I crossed a clearing, probably about 5 metres from me at its closest, utterly silent and dramatically beautiful. Never seen one in flight so close in the daylight before. I'm pretty sure it was a tawny but having searched for images online I can't find the distinctive bars on the backs of its wings (there are very few photos of the back of a tawny owl in flight on the Internet, perhaps unsurprisingly).

      Also startled a green woodpecker in the snow which jumped out in front of me and flew to the nearest tree.

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        You've reminded me ad hoc, the other night I heard an odd shrieking in the back garden, went and stood outside the back door. Happened twice more then an owl flew from the bottom of the garden, just to my right and down the side of the house. It was slightly lit from beneath by the garden LEDs, it was Tawny/Barn Owl sized. Like yours it wasn't a Tawny and a quick look at the book, a Google and a YT suggest it's one of the number of Tyto (Barn Owl) types here, most probably a Sooty Owl.

        But of course if I still did such things as record my ticks, I wouldn't count it.

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          Before Christmas I'd be out filling up the feeders once a week, and none of them ran out completely. At present I'm out there three times a week, paranoid about the regulars turning up and finding nothing to eat. Too many pigeons and other larger birds are getting involved, and they can fairly get through the food.

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            A pair of red-tailed hawks have been hanging out in a tree in my backyard. I have a good view of their regular spot from my desk.

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              A first trek out of the year at the weekend yielded kingfisher, which I didn't see at all last year - so that was pleasing. There was at least one, possibly two, hunting along a stream through one of the local golf courses and using the conveniently placed marker posts as perches.

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                I've never seen a kingfisher in the flesh. One was around the brook at the end of my road last year, my neighbour across the street saw it, but I still didn't manage to spot one even then.

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                  I'm in NZ at the moment and have been lucky enough to see a few of the endemic bird species that have been brought back from the brink by luck and good management. So many passerine species were wiped out on all but 1 or 2 offshore islands and have now been successfully reintroduced alongside heavy predator prevention efforts - saddlebacks, kokako, stitchbird and heaps of others. Of course plenty of NZ species were lost too (including the stunning Huia), but it's nice to have a few good news conservation stories amidst all the bleakness.

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                    Whereabouts are you right now gyp, and are you travelling around? A good place for birds is Stewart Island off the southern coast of South Island, which is one place kiwis and several other native species still relatively flourish – not that I came close to seeing a non-captive kiwi, mind. I particularly enjoyed visiting a smaller island named Ulva within a firth of Stewart Island, which you can travel to by boat and which is a wildlife sanctuary; the birds there are so chilled about visitors it must be something of a throwback to how the first human settlers were treated by the (alas) unafraid moas and so forth. I fondly remember sitting eating my packed lunch on the beach and a weka coming up to me and pecking at my boots to see if I tasted nice:

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                      My lunch companion today:

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                        As I've mentioned over on the Mundane Thread, the trees directly outside my living room window are being removed. That's an end to my pleasant days of watching the Coal and Blue Tits, Wrens and the occasional Woodpecker, then.

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                          It’s a damn shame.

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                            It really is. I've taken not inconsiderable pleasure from it over the past few years, and a little pride in teaching TLMG (who previously had no interest in birds) how to recognise our different visitors and their names. She even saw a Fieldfare a couple of weeks ago (or possibly a Song Thrush, she now informs me), whilst I was out, which generated an excited text message.

                            Sigh.

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                              The recent, uncommon, week of snow in South East England was a good time to see unusual visitors to the garden. We had fieldfares and redwings turn up, and linnets and redpolls (lesser, I think) join the usual selection of finches & tits visit the feeders and scoff the nyger seeds. Treecreepers were also attracted by a fatball rubbed on tree bark. The best sight by far though was a barn owl sitting on our front fence at dusk, no more than 20 feet from our window.

                              But it was a bloody expensive hobby topping up the nut, seed and fatball feeders. I reckon we ploughed through £70 of bird food in about 8 days (our normal spend is about £50 pm through winter and half that in summer).

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                                TG, sorry to hear about the trees. It always pains me how eager property owners & managers are to destroy anything that grows. Sometimes it's justified of course, but often it's done for rather spurious reasons it seems to me.

                                Slackster, I must admit to being rather envious of your recent haul, treecreeper and barn owl are indeed fine visitors. The garden where I grew up used to regularly attract fieldfare and redwing in winter thanks to the combination of nearby farmland and a crab apple tree that was always generous. Alas the farmland disappeared under housing estates and a bypass and the annual visits with it.

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                                  We’ve had a partridge and something that ate a collared dove which I’d unwittingly lured to its doom with a tasty mix of seed, leftover rice and fat pellets.

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                                    Originally posted by slackster View Post
                                    The recent, uncommon, week of snow in South East England was a good time to see unusual visitors to the garden. We had fieldfares and redwings turn up, and linnets and redpolls (lesser, I think) join the usual selection of finches & tits visit the feeders and scoff the nyger seeds. Treecreepers were also attracted by a fatball rubbed on tree bark. The best sight by far though was a barn owl sitting on our front fence at dusk, no more than 20 feet from our window.

                                    But it was a bloody expensive hobby topping up the nut, seed and fatball feeders. I reckon we ploughed through £70 of bird food in about 8 days (our normal spend is about £50 pm through winter and half that in summer).
                                    I remember a winter like this when I was in my teens (was 81-82 a bad one in the south?) A fieldfare, a redwing, a blackcap who'd missed the migration and a brambling that had done the same. Possibly a siskin too. It was like all the stragglers ended up there*. We had three nut holders, a seed table and distributed a regular scattering of apples he'd picked from his trees during the summer and stored. And crucially we kept the birdbath thawed.

                                    *like when Dad died just before Christmas 98. My brother and I were on a chilly, blustery beach in Cornwall (Charlestown) deciding where to scatter Dad's ashes. Up at the far end, looking rather forlorn was a lone black redstart.
                                    Last edited by Sits; 15-03-2018, 20:32.

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                                      Amazing pic up there Sits – is that a sacred ibis??

                                      Sorry to hear about your trees, TG, that is indeed very unfortunate. A whole row of conifers opposite a friend's windows near here got torn down the other week by a bloke across the street building a new garage at the bottom of his garden, so they've lost their familiar nesting birds there.

                                      I saw my first fieldfare in the garden in years during the snow a couple of weeks ago, hunkering down under the Bramley apple tree to get stuck into the leftover windfalls. There might be more blown in this weekend if the weather takes its predicted turn back to the worse again. Everyone around here (south Wales) seemed to be saying the snow we had was the worst since 1982, Sits, so yes I believe that was the bad winter you're likely to be thinking of.

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                                        It's an Australian White Ibis: Interesting Wiki page - clearly a great adaptor.

                                        In typical Sydney style (see also: the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo, Australian Magpie and Silver Gull) many locals have decided they are a pain in the arse and interfere with their cosy urban lives, in what was once unspoiled wilderness.

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                                          The storks came back last week, in our unseasonal warmth. The temperature getting as high as 10 degrees. Now however everything is covered in thick snow, and the current temperature is -10. The storks look about as miserable as it is possible for any bird to ever look. I hope they're OK.

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                                            I was thinking about this yesterday - our summer residents are starting to arrive back, ospreys, wheatears and such, to find rather unseasonal conditions. Not unprecedented for the time of year but certainly unusual.

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                                              Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                              The storks came back last week, in our unseasonal warmth. The temperature getting as high as 10 degrees. Now however everything is covered in thick snow, and the current temperature is -10. The storks look about as miserable as it is possible for any bird to ever look. I hope they're OK.
                                              Good news for the massive snowman though.

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                                                Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                                Now however everything is covered in thick snow, and the current temperature is -10.
                                                Dammit! Indeed, Kev – I think I've only got about 10 days before my sweepstake pick passes.

                                                I hope the storks are OK too, though, so I'm doubly hoping it warms up again pronto.

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                                                  Spent the afternoon at my local RSPB reserve. Nothing especially noteworthy but 40 different species is a good haul. I thought it was going to be 41 when a chap in one of the hides called out Marsh harrier on seeing a buzzard. Half an hour later I was in a different hide when he made the same mistake again.

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                                                    Two dreadful zoomed-in photos off the phone, but I was quite excited to see this soaring over the garden on Monday, upsetting the cockatoos. Consultation of the field guide tells me it was a Square Tailed Kite:





                                                    And higher up the photography scale, snapped by my son's girlfriend on her way home from work today (which is on a big wildlife reserve outside Canberra):

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