Tag Archives: osprey

Variety of Weather

9 Replies

Around lunchtime yesterday Julia remarked how nice the weather was compared to the forecast.

This morning at 5.20 it was lovely and bright, though I didn’t really appreciate it as I hobbled to the bathroom with half-closed eyes.

At 7.10, as I sat on the side of the bed wrestling with my socks, the rain was positively throwing itself at the bedroom windows.

First of the Marigolds

Then it brightened up a bit, then the hail started. It’s now 12.07. The sky is blue, the wind is cold and the weather is dry.

On the way home, after dropping Julia at work, I noticed that wind has stripped most of the magnolias, but a laburnum has started to blossom. it’s a bit early, but so were the magnolias.

It’s 12.14 now (I’m not writing slowly, I just got sidetracked reading about laburnums). They sky is grey, rain is tapping on the window, and only the cold wind remains constant.

Sorry, I took a bit of a diversion there. That’s the trouble with the internet. I’ve read a number of trivial news stories and noticed two more lots of rain. I’ve also made and eaten lunch.It’s now 14.14. That’s a coincidence, I just happened to look at the clock on the computer and thought it was worth mentioning. Or was it that I subconsciously saw that and decided to look. You never know, do you?

Red Kite

 

Here’s a view of Ospreys, and here are some Peregrine Falcons. The Ospreys are on Camera 2 and the Peregrines are still neat and tidy. As the season progresses they gradually amass a pile of dismembered pigeons and a variety of flies. I’d hate them outside my window. I’ve just been watching the raindrops on the Nottingham camera. Then I looked up to watch the raindrops on my windows. Amazing, isn’t it? All that awesome nature and technology and all I can do is discuss the weather.

Here are more Cathedral cameras if you want them.

Buzzard

After the Bee-eaters

17 Replies

 

Guess what we did after we saw the Bee-eaters last week?

Yes, as you may be able to guess from the pictures, we went to see the Ospreys at Rutland Water. It was an expedition with several difficulties, one being distance and another being the settings on Julia’s camera. That’s why the pictures have the look of video footage taken on a phone camera.

Ospreys at Rutland Water
Detail – Osprey carving
Osprey Carving – Rutland Water

What happened was that I ground to a halt after two hides, but nobly insisted that Julia carried on to the next one to see the Ospreys. She arrived at the relevant hide to find that her camera was mysteriously frozen, so phone shots of the CCTV were the best she could do. Good bit of lateral thinking.

The fledglings were looking quite lively, and likely to leave the nest quite soon.

Best sightings of the day for me were the damselflies and dragonflies. There were hundreds of Common Blue Damselflies about, though mostly too fast for my camera skills. The Common Darter was quite common too, and darted about. I don’t know who named these things, but they got it spot on. We did see a few others but without photos I’m not too good at identifying them.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Common Blue Damselfly (male)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Common Darter (male)

 

 

 

Kites, ospreys and six degrees of separation

Leave a Reply

We went to visit family at the weekend as part of the build-up to Christmas but managed to work in a bird watching exercise to tune us up for the Big Farmland Bird Count . We’ve spotted quite a few kites over the years as we visit family in Peterborough, and we generally see one or two around the Stamford stretch of the A1.

We saw seven kestrels, a buzzard and three kites. We could have done with a few more buzzards but as I said to Julia, this just shows how things change. When I was a kid it was a rare treat to see a buzzard and involved travelling a long way to see buzzards and all the way to Wales to even have a chance of seeing a kite. Of course, when you click the link and see there are now 700 kites to see in the area, it’s a bit deflating to think you only saw three.

After that we spent several days being ill with the latest bug going round. This is consequently our worse planned Christmas ever. I went out to buy the main stuff on a shopping trip a couple of days ago but didn’t quite get it finished because I started running out of steam (and because I ran out of space in the small-sized shopping trolley I had selected).

Next day I took a quick run down to Lidl to buy the bits I’d missed.

Now, I don’t want to subject you to a blog on my shopping habits because they aren’t very interesting, even to me, but there is one point of interest. For just under £25 I bought a serviceable-looking telescope, so it looks like bird watching in 2015 just took on a new dimension.

I’m resigned to the fact it won’t have top-quality optics but I suspect it will be better than our current telescope, purchased in the 1970s to watch a squacco heron at Eyebrook Reservoir. That brings back memories…

Later:

Sorry, when I woke up this morning I realised there was a distinct lack of Osprey in the post,. On looking again I also see no mention of the six degrees. I have excuses, of course, including three different versions of A Christmas Carol to watch.

I never did see an osprey when I was young, I had to wait until the kids started bird watching and I was able to engineer a holiday in Scotland.

However, having started looking up ospreys I found a link to a blog called Ken’s Diary. It’s about the Ospreys at Rutland Water. It also contains mention of Orton Longueville School, where he used to teach and where he recently went to talk about Ospreys.

That is the magic of the internet, you start by looking for ospreys and end up meeting your old history teacher.