Meadow Petrel

I've never seen this before but am ready for a chorus of 'it happens all the time and you might notice it more if you stopped pining after foxes'.  Anyhow, these Meadow Petrels Pipits were hovering over the sea to catch flies I assume. Only did it for a minute or so, but it didn't look like it was an accident. I'll spend a bit more time with them tomorrow to see if they do it again. 

 The final shot is what one of them was doing about 20 minutes earlier.

Weir Heron

Earlier in the year I was in Edinburgh and from the Hotel window there was a Heron that would regularly frequent the weir that was on view below.  It could be seen feeding every night on the river bank.  Needless to say, the photos of this activity were rubbish.

It also fed during the day.  This is a shot of it standing in the middle of the weir. 

Passage passerines, prey and plover. Weekly highlights 21/09/2014

Plenty kicking about this week but not necessarily in front of the camera.  The overnight rain on Monday left a puddle big enough to interest the local Wagtails (those not terrorising the local Tesco of course).  I ordered a nearby Wheatear to join them. It flatly refused.

Other birds appeared that I don't normally see.  Chaffinches for example.  Two Kestrels.  A Skylark.

A Skylark

Oh, and what is that funny looking thing over there?  Cor blimey, it's another bloody patch tick - they just keep on coming!

Ropey Record shot of patch tick Yellow Wagtail

That bird (or another) was good enough to stay for a couple of days although remaining elusive while kicking about with the ever growing number of Meadow Pipits.  

The Meadow Pipits and Linnets were the main attention of this belter on Thursday...

Still had a few Wheatears knocking about, Reed Bunting briefly, Black and possible Common Redstart and I was pleased to see that the Kingfisher is still about.  There are gulls too, but nothing noteworthy unfortunately.  A Ringed Plover was feeding with the Wagtails on Friday, here's a picture of an identical bird taken around about this time last year...

That is what last week on the patch was about, all going well next week should produce another patch tick!  I reckon that one of those stripey warblers would do it nicely....

Plenty more pics here!

Ringed Plovers doing mating

1/4000s f13 ISO1000 -.03EV

Carrion Crow doing behaviour

Mute Swan bathing

Blogger did something to this when it loaded it.   Didn't look half as green before.

Juvenile Common Tern preening

Returned for another go...

What are you doing?

I saw this gull the other day and it kept doing this weird thing.  It was twisting it's head round and looking up while its head was upside down, if that makes sense, which didn't make sense because it could have just looked up, if it wanted to look up, if you see what I mean.  And yes, that wasn't a very good sentence. It may have been trying to get rid of salty water or something similar as one of the photos has some trails of liquid around when the head was moved back.  Nonetheless, this is a rushed shot which sort of shows what it was doing.

Herring Gull doing some weird shit

Spring, sprung.

This morning, my garden was furious with the activity of birds collecting nest materials.  Here is a female blackbird doing just that.

Female Blackbird doing nest material collection