Kestrel

Bird count on Sunday morning.  It went along the following lines:

Crows 2, Magpies 2; Blue Tits 2, Robins 2 (starting to read like football results), Wood pigeons 11, Starlings about 30 (lost count after 29); Blackbirds 2, Sparrows 6; Herring gulls 2, common gulls 4;  and a Great Tit.

No shows from the collared doves, dunnocks, or wood pecker, or the long tailed tits which usual cruise through here in a flock at some stage of most days.  We also sometimes get grey wagtails from the stream across the lane, but not this year.  

It was a strangely desultory sort of day and the birds did not flock in when the food went out, but arrived in dribs and drabs.  I have to chase of the gulls (and put out a second lot of lawn food) because they wolf down anything and drive off even the crows when they are both on the ground.

Eleven big fat wood pigeons hoovering up food is also a drain on resources intended for smaller birds.  A couple of these flying elephants have worked out how to sit on the hanging trays set out for the starlings, so Sunday afternoon was spent reinstating the anti-pigeon devices (upside down, wire, hanging plant-baskets that starlings can get through).  Even though they can get through them the starlings aren't keen, but at least it means there remains some food for them to get to.

Today: the explanation for the desultory mood in the garden.  The kestrel has returned.  It was preying on sparrows in our garden this time last year. Nature, red in tooth and claw.... It is amazing to see the kestrel, but after weeks of enticing a pair of robins to use the nest box installed on the side of the garage behind a garrya elliptica, (where we can see them coming and going from the window over our kitchen sink) and hoping that this year they could raise a brood without us having to referee Tiggerish intervention, it was heart stopping to see the kestrel diving on one of the robins.  Fortunately the tangle of scrub that is my garden around the shed saved the robin and foiled the kestrel 

Yay for the robin, but even kestrels have to eat, and being nearer the top of the food chain must suffer all the more for the fall in population of our smaller bird species.

Perhaps Mr (or Mrs) Kestrel should pick on the mice that scurry out of the compost heap...

For another hour the garden was devoid of all but gulls, crows and the ubiquitous 'flying elephants'.

I have no photos to illustrate any of this so here are three I took from the northbound platform of Havant railway station at about 0730 one morning last week: a crow practicing being a Xmas tree topper in trees around the cricket pitch.

And a moon view out the other side of the station as I was arriving for my commute. (The sky is not blue in the sense of cloudless, that is just the quality of the early morning light.)