Put A Ring On It!

My fascination with bird ringing began back in 2003, when my family and some family friends visited the then recently built Barnes Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve. There we met a man who had collected some birds for ringing. He down a little cloth bag, reached in and pulled out a Blue Tit, which he proceeded to give to my little sister to hold. He showed her how to hold its head gently still between her fingers and cup its body in her hand, and I remember how tiny it was and how amazing it was to see it close up.


Ringing birds is, of course, not really about seeing birds close up but its easy to see why my 13 year old self might have latched onto this! Since then I've learned a lot more about why birds are ringed, and how recoveries can teach us so much about the species; its migration patterns, its lifespan, its population movements, and its presence in new locations. The basic principle, for those who haven't heard of ringing, is that a lightweight metal ring is put around the leg of the bird giving the location it was caught and a unique reference number. That means if the bird is caught again or the ring is found, the number can be used to find out all sorts of information about the bird. In Britain as far as I know its possible to ring any species of bird if you have the right licenses and know the right techniques, but the type of ringing I got the opportunity to see today was mist net ringing. This is when a thin, billowing net stretched between poles is used to catch small birds in flight. Other techniques include ringing chicks in the nest (I've seen a program where this was used for raptors- I can imagine that ringing could be especially important for species of raptor that are still illegally killed in this country) and using a type of throwing net to surround members of a flock of birds, such as geese. I think I've seen this one on a program too, possibly Autumnwatch, where it was used to not-particularly-great effect on a flock of Brent Geese- only about two were captured! In general I don't know much about these techniques.


This morning, I was lucky enough to attend a ringing session at Titchfield Haven, along with my mum and about 10 other visitors. It started at 6am! This meant getting up at 4.30 for me. But it's amazing how getting up horrendously early to do something you love is a million times easier than, say, getting up at that hour for work. When we arrived, we were taken to a secret part of the reserve, behind one of the mysterious 'keep out' signs on one of the boardwalks. Here there was a little hut, with wires running towards it, and a table outside covered in ringing equipment. The wires, we soon discovered, were powering a CD player in the hut, and several speakers around by the nets that were playing various bird songs. There was a Willow Warbler song, which I've heard many times in real life, and a Grasshopper Warbler song, which I've never heard in real life but recognised from descriptions (it sounds just like a very loud grasshopper). Grasshopper Warblers are active at dawn, so the tape had been playing for a while before we arrived to encourage them into the net, and the trained ringers doing the session had already been round the nets once and emptied them.


 There were three or four fully trained ringers, and one trainee ringer (a young woman just like myself- yay! Sometimes I feel like the only young female birdwatcher in the world) doing the session. The trainee ringer started out being the scribe, which is the person who will record details of the birds species, its age, its ring number and its condition. This information, once computerised, will be the information that anyone recapturing the ringed bird will get, so its very important, and it looked a complicated job too as information comes very thick and fast during the actual ringing!


Hanging outside the hut were many cloth drawstring bags, some of which were vibrating slightly. The ringers began removing the birds from the bags, and the first birds that were revealed were the Grasshopper Warblers that the recorded song had attracted. This was the first time I'd ever seen one, and though I was expecting that we would see them and had hoped I would recognise them, being familiar with pictures of them, I was somewhat baffled when the first birds were drawn out of the bags, as birds in the hand look so different. But were were shown their distinguishing feature- the barred feathers under their short tails, which are plain on most birds.


The warblers were held in the way the man at Barnes showed my sister- head supported between two fingers with the body against the palm and the legs pointing outwards for the ring to be attached. The rings were taken from a plastic string, placed in a pair of pliers and gently attached to the bird's leg, loosely enough that it can move freely up and down the leg and will never pinch into it. While in the hand, each bird's wings were measured (while closed, from the first joint to the end) and they were weighed, by placing the bird beak down into one of those little film container pots, for the shortest time possible for the scale to register their weight.


Soon the Grasshopper Warblers were all done, and released straight away in the opposite direction from the nets. The next birds were Reed and Sedge Warblers, which I did recognise, especially the Sedge Warblers with their distinctive pale eyebrows (actually superciliums but that's a mouthful) and their bright ochre streaky plumage. The Sedge Warblers made no noise in the hand, but the Reed Warblers were very noisy, calling indignantly even while inside the weighing device. None of the birds made any noise in the bags. Being in a dark place is generally calming for birds.


Next came some young Whitethroats, which were again hard to identify in the hand. Whitethroat juvenile plumage is pale all over the underside and not just the throat, so it was hard to make the association, even though I've seen young Whitethroats in the wild. The ringers were assigning the birds a number based on their estimated age, and while for some birds it was easy to tell they were juveniles (the Whitethroats, a Dunnock that had the streaky breast and pink beak juveniles have), for others it was harder. The ringers showed us how to guess a bird's age using its feathers- the adults would be expected to have worn edges to their wing and tail feathers (especially as some birds like Reed and Sedge Warblers apparently don't moult until they've migrated back to southern Africa), while the juveniles were more likely to have clean edged feathers. I think they said the code was 1 (for birds still in the nest) up to 8 for aging the birds, with these juveniles being assigned a 3. All aging had to be done very carefully with no assumptions recorded.


There was one young bird that was put in the 2 category, and we were shown why. When the ringer brought it round to us from the nets he said he was going to release it back where it was found instead of at the ringing area because it was so young. It was a Cetti's Warbler, and while it looked fairly well feathered at first, under its wings you could see all the feathers weren't grown yet, which led to a very odd effect- the wing bone actually shows between the feathers! I've seen this before in young birds (not living ones but sadly dead ones that I've had to opportunity to study), and while I didn't get a photo of the Cetti's warbler's underwings (it moved so quickly and my camera is not great for quick moving subjects so I got very few photos throughout the session) I do have this photo of a dead young Great Tit I found in May this year to show you what it was like.

You can see the bone where it joins the body, as well as the 'tubes' the new feathers grow from.

It's so strange to think of young birds going about with their bones showing under their wings! Seeing a Cetti's Warbler up close was wonderful as well, as they are very good at hiding and are hard to see in the field. (Though I did get a very good view last year of one singing right out in the open! I talked about it in my new year's post.) It was a lovely chocolate brown, and had very short, rounded wings that were very different from the other warblers' wings.

An adult Cetti's Warbler in mid-moult, which is why it's so scruffy.

The ringers went around to empty the nets several more times, and in small groups were were able to go and see this happening. Only a trained ringer can extract a bird from a mist net, because they can sometimes be tangled and have to be extracted very carefully. When we first approached the nets there were several more small warblers, and something bigger and much more colourful. It was a Kingfisher! When it had been carefully extracted, the ringer showed us an odd quirk of the Kingfisher- when in the hand, it revolves its head slowly round and round, like a tracking CCTV camera, going almost 360 degrees, or so it looked! Apparently the only other British bird to do this in the hand is the Wryneck, and though I have heard Wrynecks use this odd neck action in the field to scare or confuse predators (which is where the name comes from, and I have heard this is supposed to look like a snake but I don't know for sure), no one seems to have seen Kingfishers doing this in the field. Presumably it does it to look out for danger.

It made no sound in the hand, but kept opening its giant beak all the same.

When the Kingfisher came out of the bag, the ringers had to get a special, extra short ring out to accommodate the Kingfisher's very short legs.

The Kingfisher was a juvenile, which was tentatively sexed as a male due to the only small amount of orange at the base of the bill (females have more). They said it's not possible to tell for sure at this age though. There are no suitable nest sites for Kingfishers at Titchfield Haven so this one must have moved in from elsewhere, and Titchfield Haven is a great place to see Kingfishers outside of the breeding season so I'm sure it's finding the fishing very good!

Only about a third of the lower mandible was orange- sexing clue!

The Kingfisher was definitely the star of the morning! Just look at this wonderful plumage.

 

Spangled' is the only word to describe those feathers!

The birds were also assigned a number to show how much body fat they were carrying. This was judged by the simple technique of blowing on the birds' breast feathers to part them and show the shape of the chest. The fat showed up as pinky-yellow bumps. We saw an adult Sedge Warbler that had an extremely large amount of fat on its body, so that it was put category 8 meaning the highest amount! When it was released the ringer said it might drop right to the ground because of its weight. This didn't quite happen, but almost! This bird will have to do an incredibly long migration quite soon, so it's building up for that. It's normal for migratory birds to put on an incredible amount of weight, and some (like some waders) even compress their internal organs to make more room for fat stores.

On the other side of this was the other 'big' bird caught (the Kingfisher being the other, though they aren't big at all really), a juvenile Blackbird. It had lots of speckling still, though a full tail. The tail was dark so I guessed it was a male, but the ringers guessed female (though too soon to tell for sure) and said that even female Blackbirds have very dark tails, so I may have been wrongly sexing a few tail feathers in my collection! When the ringers blew on its feathers to judge the weight there was no fat on it at all, just a sharp ridge along the middle of its chest that was the bird's keel bone jutting out under its skin. You couldn't see it at all when the feathers were in their normal positions, and it's so strange to think that feathers cover up these huge differences in the shapes of birds' chests. The young Blackbird pooed while it was in the bag, and the purple colour of the dropping suggested the bird had been living on fruit, so maybe it hasn't got good enough at feeding itself on invertebrates yet? I'm sure there's lots of good weather left this season so it has plenty of time.

One of the things I had hoped would happen during this session was a recapture of a bird from elsewhere or a previous year, and this sadly didn't happen, though a bird ringed a few days ago by the same ringers did show up. However as a feather enthusiast I also wanted to learn more about feathers, and that certainly did happen! In the past I've seen feathers that have dark bars of wear across them, and I'd assumed this was part of the natural wear of the feather. But one of the ringed birds had these dark bars on its tail feathers, and the ringer told us this can be caused by a disruption in feeding while the bird is a baby in the nest, such as if it rains for a couple of days and the parent bird can't feed them constantly like they would on a dry day. It was fascinating! I had a quick look in my collection to see if I had a feather with these bars handy but couldn't find one.

The other fascinating thing I found out was about Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers, and the one way to confidently tell them apart in the hand. I always used to go by the old 'dark legs=Chiffchaff, pale legs=Willow Warbler' thing but that's not reliable. (To be honest, I still go by it sometimes as it's just easier! Of course if the birds are singing their incredibly different songs then it's ok. ^^) But when they're in the hand, the ringers showed us how to look at the primary feathers to tell the difference. In both birds, after the first feather in the wing, the outer webs of the primaries are emarginated. In Chiffchaffs this continues to the the 6th primary, but in Willow Warblers it only goes up to the 5th primary. It was really good to finally hear a concrete way of telling them apart, but not exactly something you can use in the field! 

There were several Willow Warblers in the session, and all were the loveliest lemon yellow colour in their eyestripe and all over their underparts. The ringers said Willow Warblers were more likely than Chiffchaffs to be bright like this, which confused me as a few years ago in autumn we had a very yellow leaf warbler in the garden for a few weeks that I'd always thought was a Chiffchaff. I'd been going by leg colour which isn't reliable, but thinking about it it might have been a bit late for Willow Warblers at the time, as they leave for their migration earlier. Maybe colouring varies depending on where the 'batch' of Chiffchaffs or Willow Warblers are from. The ones we caught today were probably migrants grounded by the cloudy weather, and they might have all come from the same place.

Look at those lovely bright yellow feathers!

Some of the Willow Warblers had quite dark legs (though always with a pinkish tinge) but they also all had very brightly coloured feet that were this strange pinky-yellow colour! Late in the session a Chiffchaff was caught (one of only a couple in the whole session) and it had brightly coloured feet too, showing just how unreliable the dark legs thing is. But its plumage was totally different from the Willow Warblers', being much paler and with less yellow, though there were lovely big yellow patches on the edges of its wings! We were each given the opportunity to release a couple of birds, and I was given this particular Chiffchaff to release. It was incredible to hold it and feel it take off and fly away. :)

I've been wanting to attend a ringing session for most of my birding life and it was wonderful to finally do so! Thanks to all the ringers ran the session and taught us their knowledge. :) Though I don't think I'm quite ready to train as a ringer just yet (I don't have enough time to dedicate to the training, plus as far as I know there's no one ringing any closer to me than this Titchfield Haven, which is almost an hour away) I'm so happy I got to see it today, not to mention I got to see my first Grasshopper Warblers, and my second ever Garden Warbler!

The final list: multiples of Grasshopper Warbler, Reed Warbler, Sedge Warbler, Cetti's Warbler and Willow Warbler; a few Chiffchaffs, Whitethroats and Garden Warblers; two Wrens; and one each of Robin, Dunnock, Blackbird and Kingfisher. About 100 birds in total were ringed!

For more info on ringing, here's the BTO faqs: http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/ringing/about/faqs

Wow, what a day!

Today was a bit of a landmark for me when it comes to wildlife watching- I got some good luck! I would even say excellent luck. It involved a very special bird that I had never seen before, and set off today to the New Forest to look for. I had seen several reports of this bird in the past few days on the Hampshire bird news website in a specific part of the Forest, so I went there, and it turned out to be a very boggy part so I had to pick my way across very carefully, which was fun, especially as the soles of my walking boots were starting to flap. And as well as being a bog this was also heathland, which means I went from being surrounded by birds on the neighbouring farmland (House Sparrows, Starlings, Chaffinches, Goldfinches, Pied Wagtails, a Grey Wagtail, Bullfinches...heaven!) to being surrounded by...no birds, because heathland is like that. And the 2 Meadow Pipits that flew by weren't what I was looking for. And I tend to consider my luck when it comes to birds to be in the region of fair to poor, so I wasn't all that hopeful about finding the bird. I'm setting the scene with this stuff just to show you what a surprise it was that....

...Suddenly, what I thought for half a moment was a Magpie flapped across the path, with rounded wings and a long-ish tail, to land at the top of a tree. It was the bird I was hoping to see: a Great Grey Shrike! Its black bandit mask and big beak and bold grey and white body were just as perfect as I had hoped! It was absolutely beautiful. And what a chance that it just so happened to be in front of me at that precise moment as I picked my way across the bog! It could have been anywhere, but it was there, in front of my eyes. I watched it as it flew from tree to tree, always easy to spot when it landed because it perched openly, and its white front was easy to see from a distance. Its tail was longer than I'd expected, and I certainly wasn't expecting to see it hover for a moment, but apparently Great Grey Shrikes do that! Shrikes are carnivores so maybe it helps them see their prey. I was able to watch it for a full 5 minutes before losing sight of it. Magical.

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After that excitement I still had the whole afternoon left, so I decided to try out a nature reserve that was in the area, Blashford Lakes. I'd never been before, but upon arriving and looking out onto the large, wildfowl covered pool, practically the first thing I saw was a gorgeous drake Goldeneye! This was not something I expected to be able to find in Hampshire. And then, among a roost of Teal, I noticed a larger duck with its dark green head under its wing, with a completely white body apart from a black stripe on its side- a male Goosander! Both of these are ducks that I have seen very few times in full drake plumage, and ducks I rarely see in the county ever (actually the Goldeneye was a first for my Hampshire list, and the Goosander the first since I was about 12 or something). But it seemed that Blashford Lakes was a bit of a hotspot for Goosanders, later there was a group of about 10 with a good mixture of drakes and ducks, and there is a hide on the reserve named after them!

Walking to the other side of the reserve and entering another hide which was packed out with people, I was immediately urged to look into a spot of reeds just in front of the hide where these was a little clearing. And there, almost larger than life, was a Bittern! I say that because it was bigger than I expected. I've seen a Bittern once before, a couple of winters ago at RSPB Dungeness, Kent, and it was flying along in the distance and looked like a Grey Heron, only with a shorter neck and brown wings. But now I was looking at this wonderfully charismatic bird about 5 metres away! It had such beautiful feathers and lovely long black streaks under its huge eyes that I had never noticed in pictures before. Its funny how you can see a bird in pictures a million times and its only when you see it in real life that you notice these things about it, like when I noticed the shrike's long tail that I never noticed in pictures.

The Bittern moved very slowly like Grey Herons do when they hunt, only it was slooooowly stalking through reeds instead of on water. It could pull in its neck so it barely seemed to have one, and then extend it out in a weird bend almost like a snake. I didn't see it actively hunting, just going about in its slow, incredibly camouflaged Bitternish way. It took a very small drink from a puddle of water and then slowly, slowly drew its way out of sight, becoming so camouflaged behind the reeds that you couldn't notice the moment when it was truly gone. I watched the lake for a while (and it was very well stocked with waterfowl: there were Gadwall, Tufted Duck, Pochard, Shoveler, Wigeon Great Crested Grebe, Coot and Moorhen though oddly no Mallards), and then looked back at the reeds and the Bittern was there again! It had sneaked back into view without anyone noticing, and it delighted viewers for a little longer before sloooowly moving out of sight again. Bitterns are so, so elusive that I knew these close views were extremely lucky, and I may never see a Bittern this well again. What a time to not have my sketchbook on me, honestly! I suspect it helped that, unlike most hides, the windows in this one did not open. I think if they had, the sounds of even quiet talking and banging of the windows being opened might have made the Bittern too wary of ever being close to the hide. As it was, someone banged the door a little too loud at one point and I saw its head jerk in reaction. I got the impression of a bird that is 100% aware of its surroundings at all times.

My day of new things was not quite over- later I went to try out a different hide on the same large lagoon I was looking at when I first arrived, and while marveling at how much there was to see (an even greater array of waterfowl than before, plus a single Green Sandpiper and a Kingfisher whizzing about), I became aware from talk at the other end of the hide that there was a Red-crested Pochard somewhere in that huge array of ducks. This is a duck that's a vagrant to Britain from the Continent, with a few turning up each year, and the drake is very pretty with a fantastic, orange head that seems to glow extra bright in the sun. (and it was very sunny. Did I mention that the weather was perfect too?) This duck also has a special significance for me, which I will explain in a moment.

Now, this is a bit taboo as birdwatching is a sharing hobby and people like to help out, but I like to find birds by myself if possible (I show them to others though! But when it comes to finding birds I'm shy and also proud, and want to learn by myself. ^^) So I started scanning the ducks without asking the guys who had found the Red-crested Pochard whereabouts it was. I was looking out for that bright orange head, but in the late afternoon sunshine, the chestnut heads of all the drake Wigeon looked bright orange, so I kept thinking I'd found it when I hadn't and getting excited too soon. I also tried to look for the far plainer duck pochard, because I didn't even know if it was a duck or a drake I was looking for! And most of the ducks were too far away to see well enough with just binoculars.

I really, really wanted to see the Red-breasted Pochard because back when I was a really young wildlife watcher, about 8 or so, I was walking in a little village quite near my town when I came across a little pond that had ducks in it. But they weren't your bog-standard Mallards of farmyard ducks- they were a lovely pair of Tufted Duck (one of my favourite ducks back then) and a pair of Red-crested Pochard, a duck that wasn't even in my parents' bird book! (it only covered Britain.) I was convinced I had found my first rarity. It wasn't until many years later that I realised that I had, in fact, found someone's very small ornamental wildfowl collection. The fact that the ducks could be approached as easily as duckpond ducks, and the fact that they were arranged very neatly into pairs, were signs  that would never have fooled a more experienced birdwatcher even for a moment, but I was overjoyed at the time, and to this day old 'tick-lists' of mine from ages ago include the Red-crested Pochard when they shouldn't. The difference between truly wild vagrants, feral birds, escapes and just plain ornamental collections, when it comes to wildfowl is something every beginner needs to learn at their own pace, and I wouldn't be surprised if other birdwatchers have similar stories from when they first started out.

So, I wanted to see the Red-crested Pochard because seeing it would finally 'finish the job', as it were, and make those old tick-lists finally true. But I wasn't having any luck at all on my own. So finally, I bit the bullet and asked the guys who had found the pochard for help. A few minutes later they had re-found the bird, got their telescopes on it for me and let me take a look. And there it was: a fine drake with that bright, orange head glowing in the sun. The job was finished, and my day had included 2 'firsts' (the shrike and the pochard), 5 firsts for the year (the shrike, the pochard, the Bittern, the Goldeneye and the Goosander), and 4 firsts for the county (the shrike, the pochard, the Bittern and the Goldeneye). I was exhausted, but elated! I can tell you I never expected any of that when I set off this morning!

Quick note: I saw some really interesting fungi today which I was going to write about in this post, but its getting late and I'm starting a new job tomorrow so I need to get to bed. I will write about them tomorrow!

Queen of the Forest

My next post here (after a hiatus in which I was spending all my free time making a costume for London Expo!) was going to be about the Black Headed Gull colony I visited last week, but something so exciting happened to me yesterday that I had to write a post about it before anything else. I saw my first Goshawk!

(The New Forest has a thriving Goshawk population and this is commonly obtained information, plus its a very general area name, so I will say that the New Forest is where I saw my Goshawk, but I won't write the exact location as the nests and adult birds are still persecuted.)

I had planned to head up to the New Forest yesterday for a bit of raptor watching, seeing as it was my day off and the weather has been so warm and sunny, ideal for birds of prey that like to soar on thermals. I checked the weather for the area and it said sunny and sunny with clouds, all fine and awesome. And then I woke up that morning to find it raining heavily. But I thought 'it's fine, the forecast's good for the New Forest so I'll drive down anyway!' ...and of course once I arrived it was raining there too. I had planned to drive down relatively early as the morning is better than afternoon in terms of bird activity, but I ended up sitting in Costa in Lyndhurst for an hour waiting for the rain to ease off. And every time someone opened the door I could hear distant thunder and I'm feeling pretty miffed at the weatherman. BUT sure enough at about 11, it started to ease off and the sky was brightening. So I jumped in the car and drove down to the raptor watchpoint, and took my telescope and tripod to the top, and by that point the rain had indeed pretty much stopped. And what's more, it didn't return for the rest of the day. So I forgave the weatherman everything. :D

I had decided to spend about an hour on the watchpoint and then head on to another part of the forest, so I set up the scope on shortened tripod legs in the hope that I could look through it while sitting down. It didn't really work so I ended up squatting, which caused no end of pins and needles but it was all totally worth it! Because then along the treeline flew a long-tailed, pointed-winged bird, clearly a bird of prey, and I assumed a Hobby at first. I had been practising getting the telescope onto birds quickly by focusing on Woodpigeons and Stock Doves that were flying by (this isn't easy at first, but you can do it by finding a distinctive looking tree near the bird with the naked eye, and then finding it in the scope), so I got the bird in view without too much trouble. Looking at it more closely I could see it was far too big for a Hobby, and not just big but heavily built, with 'fingers' at the ends of its wings (meaning that you could see the separate feathers pointing out), and had a brown back, a whitish underside and no visible falcon-marks (what I have taken to calling the 'moustache' markings Peregrines and Hobbys have on their faces). I dared to hope it was a Goshawk. Sparrowhawks are the big confusion species (or should I say small, because they are much smaller than Goshawks, but size is a real pain to judge at a distance) but it didn't look or behave like any Sparrowhawk I'd ever seen before. Sparrowhawks don't spend a lot of time soaring around, whereas this bird was gliding over the trees, interjecting the gliding with several powerful flaps. I was pretty sure it was a Goshawk, but pretty sure isn't good enough when its your first ever time seeing a bird you have wanted to see since your interest in birds started...you don't want a maybe then! Luckily I had a second opinion- I had just watched the hawk land in a dead tree, where it remained for a while, when the one other guy up on the watchpoint said to me: 'Did you see the Gos?' So there it was- if someone else thinks it looks like a Goshawk too then I know it's not just me being deluded! :D

Two more men arrived on the watchpoint and we were all watching when the Goshawk, who had dropped out of sight behind the trees, appeared again, and we were treated to extended views of this wonderful bird. While certainly not close to us by any means, it flew close enough that through the scope I could see the eyestripe marking on its face. Its back was a dark shade of warm brown, and the other watchers told me that means it's a first year bird- adults have grey backs. Large species of birds sometimes take at least a year to become old enough to breed, so I imagine this bird will be roaming for at least a year, learning to hunt well enough to support a chick and/or a mate, if it is a male. The more experienced people watching with me, who had all seen Goshawks before, were speculating about its gender and even wondering if the sightings involved two different birds, an male and a female. Female Goshawks are much larger than males, but size is very difficult to judge at a distance so it makes sense that they couldn't be sure. But they seemed to think it was probably a female we were watching. Hence the title of this post!

At one point while the hawk was in flight over the trees, a Stock Dove flew out of some foliage quite near it. It seemed to fly towards the hawk for a moment, before doing a double-take, turning around and flying as fast as possible in the opposite direction. But the Goshawk was on its tail! It chased the dove back and forth, as the dove kept making frantic turns as if trying to shake the hawk off. Sometimes it seemed like the dove would escape, as a quick maneuver would widen the distance between them, but always the Goshawk would narrow the distance in the blink of an eye and be close enough again to swipe at the dove with its talons. It was truly thrilling to watch. In the end they both dropped out of sight behind a tree, and the hawk did not reappear for a long while. I didn't see the moment its talons connected but I can make a guess that the hawk caught the dove, and spent the next hour or so plucking and eating it in privacy. The viewers on the hill had by now increased to at least 15, the numbers swelled by what was probably a birdwatching group, so the many observers made sure nothing was missed and everyone saw everything, including a distant Hobby, Buzzards, and Tree Pipits and Meadow Pipits doing their parachuting display flights all around us. The Goshawk was back in view about an hour later and was on the wing again. Just watching it fly was fascinating, this hawk is a master in the air. (You'd need to be to even attempt catching another bird in level flight! I never knew Goshawks did this and only thought the tiny, nippy Merlin could do so.)

So far this year I have been to this spot 3 times, in the hope of finding a Goshawk but never thinking there was any more than an outside chance, even though they live in the Forest. They are secretive and live deep in woodland, and are hard to tell from the smaller and much commoner Sparrowhawk, to the point that county recorders probably see more Sparrowhawk photos that someone hoped was a Goshawk than of any other bird. When it comes to illegal persecution by humans, the Goshawk is one of the most at risk, along with the Buzzard and Hen Harrier, because these species sometimes take gamebirds or their chicks as their prey. It was actually wiped out in Britain in the early 1900s, but had recolonised by the 60s, probably because of falconers birds escaping into the wild. It's like the reintroduction that conservationists would almost certainly have suggested anyway, as with the White Tailed Eagle, happened without them even trying! I love that. And the descendants of these escaped birds are certainly wild again now.

Finding a Goshawk for myself was a dream come true, and watching it for so long was just wonderful. I had never expected to spend almost 3 hours on that hill, but it was well worth it! And everyone I was watching with was so kind and knowledgeable. The birdwatching community can really be awesome. :)

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A final note: I found a pair of Curlews later in a different part of the forest, and got to hear their wonderful call 'currrrrrrrr-LEW-cur-LEW-cur-LEW!) echoing across the heathland. I don't think I've ever seen Curlews so far from the coast before. They are a large wader with a long, curved beak that can be seen on coasts outside of the breeding season but breeds on heathland and moorland. I spotted them mobbing a crow from a distance and suspected their nest must be on the ground near where they were, so I gave them a wide berth in case I disturbed the nest. They still spotted me though and alarm called angrily as I passed. Their alarm call is like the bark of a small yappy dog!