Pittswood Birds

A walk over to the Scrub area by the lake provided me with the now usual migrant species, COMMON and LESSER WHITETHROAT, BLACKCAP, CHIFFCHAFF and CUCKOO, all giving some song. GREY LAG and CANADA GEESE were on the lake, the latter with their goslings still surviving.

I cut through the tree nursery, which had a jcb ripping out the old fencing, so nothing seen there! Migrant alley had even bigger earth moving jcb's, so nothing seen there either, well, apart from the ROOKS, PIED WAGTAILS and JACKDAWS gathering the morsels uncovered by the earth movers.

I decided I would walk over to the college grounds, and try to find the last breeding migrant that has yet to visit my patch this year - the Spotted Flycatcher. Last year a pair arrived on the 9th May, the mean arrival date being the 7th, today! and was the only pair to do so, maybe it's not a certainity to turn up this year. I hung around all the usual spot-fly haunts, getting some strange looks from the college students and lecturers, but no sign was found of them.

So it was a pretty poor afternoon really, and as well as seeing nothing in particular, I was getting blasted by a cold wind! I decided to call it a day, but as I crossed Migrant Alley, I saw a small rapter comming over from the greenhouse complex, I got my bins on it and saw that it was a HOBBY, only my second this year, I watched it fly purposely NE, but before it got halfway over the fields and paddocks, out of nowhere came the PEREGRINE. It saw off the Hobby quick enough, despite the Hobby being more the agile flyer, at one point the Peregrine chased the Hobby almost to the floor. It's great having a pair of local peregrines on my patch, but I hope they are not going to chase off every other Raptor that comes over!


Below is an attempt to photograph the Hobby