Red Kite Soaring

Last weekend as I sat quietly reading a book in the garden at R’s family home, I glanced up to see a large raptor circling lazily in the hot summer sky. Buzzards are common in that part of Hampshire, but this most certainly was not a buzzard. The forked tail gave this spectacular bird away. It was a red kite.

I sat entranced as it approached, lower and lower, quartering the field below the garden. It made a couple of lazy passes over my head, enabling me to capture these images on my not so great little point ‘n’ shoot, then sailed languidly away. A better flyer than a red kite you will never see; swifts and swallows and falcons are spectacular, but a red kite seems to defy gravity. With the tiniest adjustment of those long wings they can swoop or hang as if suspended on a string, turning and gliding, a burst of acceleration followed by an eerie stillness, all lazily performed (it seems) with the minimum of effort. Watching these birds you almost believe that if you stepped off a high enough cliff with your arms raised just so…

The birds beauty and prowess are not the only reasons for feeling surprised joy when one just casually appears above you. It was at one point nearly extinct in the UK, with only five breeding pairs surviving. And yet in Tudor London these birds were common scavengers,  with a contemporary report stating that “the kites are so tame, that they often take out of the hands of little children, the bread smeared with butter given to them by their mothers“*. Although officially protected in London for their valuable scavenging services by which much putrefying material was removed from the streets, red kites were persecuted throughout the British Isles until they reached their final perilous decline. By the 1920′s, the red kite was all but wiped out.

It’s spectacular comeback means that while red kites are by no means common, you are more and more likely to get lucky and see one with every passing year, and indeed they can be locally common. They are moving outwards at last from their strongholds in Wales and The Chilterns, and this bird is one of a pair which arrived in the neighbourhood only this summer. The first time I ever saw one close up I will never forget; it exploded out of a farmers field on top of Winter Hill near Cookham, a flurry of rusty red and charcoal and so very obviously the rare bird of my dreams that I actually shouted it’s name out loud. A grinning local out walking his dog told me I that if I liked red kites, I was in for a treat. He was right; that afternoon was spent on Winter hill with a picnic, a bottle of wine and the spectacle of red kites in plenty riding the wind below us. I will never forget that first sighting.

*Source of quote:- Birds Brittanica

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

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Adventures and earning my keep

I spend a lot of time travelling in the summer. You’ll have seen in my previous post that I recently spent a week in Copenhagen – it was that wonderful luxury that is a real holiday. It’s usually been the case throughout my life that when travelling I am also doing some kind of work, either voluntary or paid. I live on my wits, and I live like a mouse – I have no expensive tastes and generally try to make my enthusiasms pay in some way – I love the natural world, so I’ll do little jobs for nature reserves and kill two birds with one stone, as the ill fitting cliché goes. I’ve done some amazing things in my life by living that way. But Copenhagen was a holiday pure and simple, and for me it was expensive.

The problem with having such an incredibly tight budget is that even the smallest indulgence has to go by the wayside when times are hard, and a huge indulgence like a holiday throws everything out of balance.  I don’t know if anyone noticed that this website vanished for a day or so recently -  it’s because my yearly hosting and domain bill had been due… and I’ll leave you to guess the rest. I am hugely relieved that I didn’t lose The Birds In The Meadow and have to start again, it was always meant to be self sufficient and has in fact paid for it’s-self many times over as well as providing much needed income.  However, having re-purchased my domain name and hosting, it seems that I have also run out of hosting space on the server which in plain talk means I can’t actually continue a picture heavy blog here any more ’till I sort out my finances and buy some more webspace. A fine mess, and I’ll apologise for it right now. If anyone’s interested, there is a 15% off sale over at the shop, which I’m hoping will help the process along. I know, I have no shame. Well, maybe just a little…

In the meantime, I’ve dusted off a Blogger blog I began earlier this year and kept very much under my hat because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, or even if I could find time to keep it updated. It’s called The Aethernaut, and I’m thinking of it as a picture heavy personal diary, a little more succinct than what I’ve made here. You can keep an eye on me over there, and most important for me at the moment, it’s not likely to vanish any time soon.

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Stormy North Sea Sky

So where have I been this last fortnight? Away in Copenhagen visiting our friend Sonja at the Distortion Festival, and it’s taken me about the same amount of time to recover. R and I decided a while ago that if we were going to do any short haul European travel we wouldn’t fly. It’s not just for environmental reasons either – making the travel part of the fun is a huge reason too. Ferries and trains in Europe are a lovely way to travel. Hint: always carry a bit of root ginger, crystallised ginger, ginger ale or whatnot, as ginger calms travel sickness like nothing else can and makes a rough voyage as comfy as can be.  Anyway, our love of slow travel is what enabled me to get this picture of a stormy evening sky over the North Sea. You can’t see it in the picture but there was quite a swell already; by nightfall it was raining and there were huge waves too.

The ferry was vast and incredibly comfortable, so much nicer than being cramped in an aeroplane. However the bar was terrifyingly expensive;  we got some beer anyway and sat watching the “floorshow” – a hard bitten Glasgwegian wedding singer who plainly had cabin fever and couldn’t wait for his last show to end. His jokes probably hadn’t been funny when he began his tour and he wasn’t even pretending any more – at one point he walked off mid song and disappeared for about five minutes, presumably to take a big slug of Dutch Courage. Seriously, I could write a novel about this guy, but before I am tempted to do so I should describe the rest of the journey. The waves were pretty huge by the time we went back to our cabin, but thanks to my root ginger habit (see above) I was not feeling in the least seasick. However I was disconcerted when, once in bed, the ship was lurching and swaying so much that my head was hitting the headboard and I was sliding up and down the bed at irregular intervals. Luckily I was tired enough to sleep well once accustomed to the movement.

The train Journey across Denmark to Copenhagen was breathtaking – the countryside in gloriously sunny early summer (just a couple of weeks behind GB) was mesmerising and I longed to walk in the meadows and woods I saw speeding by. The huge bridge and tunnel that takes you across to the island of Zealand is an extra excitement. And the train its-self was comfortable, spacious, and fast. I love train travel – it accustoms you a little to the new place you are in. So much better than having to fly.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

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Swallows and Swifts make the summer

I look forward to seeing my first swallow of the year.  Usually in the London area they arrive around the 15th April – an astonishing feat of punctuality when you consider the vast distance they travel. Some however get it wrong; I once saw a single bird hawking over Connaught Water in Epping Forest in thick March snow, and wondered if swallows mightn’t be better off if they had evolved the ability to hibernate as people once believed they did, in the mud at the bottom of lakes.

They’ve been around the south of England for over a month now, the screeching daredevil Swifts arriving not long after. In truth it is swifts we see most often in my part of London – exhilarating and rowdy they mob and scatter between the house roofs, impossible to catch on film, for me at least. And to tell the truth I don’t even try, the clue to the pleasure of watching swifts is in the name.

Once I was lucky enough to be doing a bit of work on a local nature reserve when a gigantic mixed flock of swallows and martins swooped in and wheeled and twittered in their thousands over the water – the site comprises grassland and a disused reservoir. It was exhilarating, beautiful and it was my first day there – in my eagerness, I’d turned up early. I thought that every day would start like this. When the ranger arrived he told me I’d been lucky, because I’d actually seen the birds arrival from Africa – it was indeed April 15th.

Last September when camped on the Isles of Scilly, we watched the swallows in their restless gathering as they prepare for the gruelling journey back to Africa. Sitting on a hot deserted beach on the tiny island of Gugh, we watched as twenty or more arrowed back and forth across the sand just a few inches above the ground, effortlessly changing course over stationary and moving obstacles as they hawked for sand flies. I aimed my camera at them as they flashed past and caught nothing but blurs, but then again, sharpness isn’t the point. Frozen perfection would never get across how it felt to watch these mercurial creatures.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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Town Fox, Country Fox

We’ve always had urban  foxes passing through and spending time in our garden, but there seems to be an excess of vulpine activity in these parts of late.  Their fine sense of just how long it’s safe to stare at the stupid human before flowing silkily under or over the fence to safety displays a magnificent comic insolence.  And now that their activities have taken on a destructive and faintly macabre air I feel like the slow witted butt of many a foxy joke. It’s almost like Wiley E Coyote is getting his own back in a small suburban English garden, and I am the one who’s playing the straight guy.

They’ve always dug the occasional hole in the grass, and they’ve always dumped bones in the flower beds. We have become blasé to their eerie nocturnal shrieking and if they eat an occasional bird… well, they are only making a living after all, and I bet they eat a good many rats, too. We rub along together pretty well. But last week I was astonished to find a whole sheep skull under the rosemary bush looking at me through empty eye sockets like a prop from a remake of Lord Of The Flies.  And yesterday our neighbour in the flat downstairs (who is a strict vegan) found two large meaty bones abandoned on her back doorstep. Presumably someone is feeding them, or they are raiding illegally dumped food waste. I’d love to know where this stuff is coming from, but the foxes aren’t telling.

They’ve dug up our carrots and they’ve strewn Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes around like a bunch of truanting kids. They pulled up a tomato plant, just for fun. There is nothing they like better than gnawing at and playing football with our flowerpots, and they especially love my old workboots which I planted with geraniums; I never know where I’m going to find them from one morning to the next. They treat our garden the way rock stars treat hotel bedrooms. And I would love to see them doing it.

But oddly, the best sighting I’ve had all this year was of a wild country fox, hunting voles in a lush spring meadow. Country foxes are warier beasts all together, so I guessed all we’d get was a brief glimpse before it saw us and vanished into the long grass. But we were screened by a thick hedgerow and the wind was in our favour – the fox had no idea we were there at all.

It combed the meadow, listening intently for a sound that might betray a rodent or bird.  It was a lesson to see how it went about it’s business, calm and patient yet utterly focussed, and it wasn’t long before we saw it pounce and eat some small unlucky thing.

It came closer and closer as it quartered the field, I still can’t quite believe it came so close that I could get these pictures with my humble point-and-shoot camera. I’ve hesitated to photograph wild animals before, out of respect and and a desire to not spoil a moment with the clattering of the shutter, but watching this creature go about it’s daily business did not feel intrusive. A lesson in methodical patience, it went about the chore of feeding itself with a relaxed unhurried alertness and I tried to do the same as I recorded it.

We must have watched it hunting in the sunshine and long grass for ten minutes or more and I would have gladly stayed longer, but we were only half way through our walk and needed to keep going if we were to make it home before dark.

As we continued to walk along the field edge the fox continued hunting, its beauty glowing bright in the sun. If I ever felt the slightest irritation with it’s city living cousins those feelings got melted utterly as I looked over my shoulder and watched it, still stalking the long grass, till it was out of sight.

To read more Nature Notes, why not visit Rambling Woods – in fact, why not write a Nature Notes post of your own?

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