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Lockdown birding at home

By April 7th, I had already ‘enjoyed’ two weeks of self-isolation and was starting my second week of ‘ordinary’ Lockdown.  I am fortunate that my garden and the fields I can see from it have most of the bird species of the surrounding habitat.  I have three standard bird feeders hanging between a climbing rose and a clematis.  The proximity of cover makes the birds more confident.   One feeder contains sunflower hearts and is often emptied daily by the flocking hoards.  The others have peanuts, and there is a bowl of clean water nearby.  I also scatter some seeds in the corner of the patio, mainly to attract the bank voles that race out to grab a seed and scurry back into cover. 

I had started my garden Lockdown birdlist on 16th March. The combination of the garden shrubs and trees, feeders and water had been attracting numerous blue, great and long tailed tits, chaffinches, blackbirds and occasionally a song thrush and an almost permanent presence of a small flock of goldfinches.  There have been at least six greenfinches, a higher number than I recall in previous years but before Lockdown I rarely watched for so long so how would I know?  Robins and more surprisingly dunnocks have learned how to take the sunflower hearts from the bottom of the feeder.  I remember an ex-colleague watching dunnocks feed under some feeders and commenting on their inability to look up – he was wrong!

I have watched the feeders regularly.  Late march was still quite cold here, and the star visitors were the five stunningly attractive bramblings – males and females in different stages of moult into summer plumage.  A lesser redpoll made a brief appearance, while a pair of great spotted woodpeckers were daily and somewhat more rapacious visitors.

On April 7th the garden held all the regular attendees at the feeders, while woodpigeons, stock and collared doves sat around in the trees as usual.  Every morning, and this was no exception, pheasants and red-legged partridges called from the fields around, and jackdaws sat on the roof, still annoyed that I had recently netted the chimney to stop them nesting inside it.  The formations of greylags did their regular fly past first thing, and the pair of Egyptian geese that were trying to nest next door growled until they were disturbed by folk leaving the house. 

As most mornings, a red kite appeared overhead, though it has been less frequent now, hopefully because it was preoccupied with nesting.  What a fantastic conservation success story the red kite is.  Common buzzards had been displaying frequently – one afternoon a ‘kettle’ of 8 birds formed over the garden, though they too were becoming less frequent now.  Surprisingly, I had still not seen house sparrows in the garden, despite them breeding in the village.  Until this day, my best birds were the delightful pair of tree sparrows that were nest building in the box on the side of the house.

But the unforgettable event of the that day took place in the hours just before and after dawn.  I was woken by a message from a friend at 0421 – he was in New York so timing was understandable (from his perspective). After checking that there was no serious news, I lay back in the dark relishing dozing for an hour or two.  In the distance, the local tawny owl hooted from my neighbour’s trees.  Then the local oystercatchers joined in, loudly – their shrill piping not always welcomed by my neighbours. They – the birds not the neighbours – appeared to be doing circuits of the house, making more noise than usual.  But in the distance a different, two-note call drifted through the open window.  Suddenly I was awake. Scrambling out of bed, I stood at the window and listened intently.  The call came again, and then again.  I’d been following the Nocmig developments earlier in the week on social media, with reports of common scoters from many locations in southern Britain, so I had been hoping I might get lucky……… 

But this was better.  What was flying over was the wailing heath chicken, aka Norfolk plover, or more widely called the stone-curlew.   What was curious was that the calling continued – the bird or birds were not just flying over, they were flying around.  I decided I had better confirm my identification.  Xeno-canto brilliantly delivered that confirmation – it was the typical flight call of stone-curlews, and there were at least two birds as the calls were coming from different directions across the garden.

Once it was light enough to see, I went into the garden scanning the sky in the direction of the calls.  The birds were obviously not in the garden, but they were close. Frustratingly, a fence, a tall hedge and a few cherry trees blocked my view of the fields in their direction.  I contemplated getting out the step ladder and seeing if I could sit atop and scan the fields but decided it would be a lot simpler to walk round the other side of the neighbour’s garden (after all I had them on the garden list as a ‘heard’!).

I left the house and quietly walked around the neighbour’s house, and turned along his boundary, and continued until I was level with the end of my garden. Within seconds of raising my binoculars I was looking straight at a stone-curlew looking straight back at me, less than 50m away.  My pulse raced and, steadying the bins, I saw a partly obscured second bird, then a third, all walking together slowly along the field furrows.  Carefully, slowly and quietly, I set up the scope, focussed, watched for some 20 minutes and capturing some images on my phone.  Brilliant, just brilliant. April 7th was a special day.

Three weeks later, as I write this, the pair of stone-curlews are incubating.  

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