I'll give this thread a go. Unfortunately the long Easter weekend was blighted by poor weather but I still managed to see some interesting stuff.
April Fool's Day
1115. At our usual viewing point. Cold (about 7 degrees) and damp, thanks to the rain that had fallen in the morning and over most of the last two days; sky very grey, but visibility into the distance pretty good. Practically no wind forecast - a good thing in one respect as the wind chill can be vicious, but without at least a bit of wind over the city, would they prefer to sit on their perches, rather than take to the air?
We start scanning the sky, on the hunt, going from one silhouette to the next as we search for the one target we are looking for amongst the many birds soaring or flying over the city. All the city gulls (herring gulls, black-headed gulls and lesser black-backed) are too long-winged and have a different manner of flight. Common buzzards (none of these are sighted today) are broader and longer-winged, and soar in a much more relaxed manner. A single domestic or feral pigeon can fly in the right way, with fast powerful wingbeats, but is shorter-winged, and most of the high pigeons we see will also tend to shift in their flight as they commute across the city, rather than fly in the direct manner of the bird we are after - which is also a good reason for them to fly as they do, never flying in a direct course for too long...
1150. I sight the first target I've spotted this stint just over a kilometre or so out from our position, over one of the many cranes engaged in construction work across the city. At this distance there is no mistaking what it is, and we can see it is visibly smaller and thinner-winged than the female my brother had spotted earlier. He goes over the building upon which his mate is probably sitting tight on eggs deep in her sheltered ledge, then comes closer to our position, gaining altitude as he does. Despite the windless conditions (at least at ground level), he, like the female earlier, has no trouble climbing high into the grey April sky - indeed, smaller and lighter, he goes up even more effortlessly, circling upwards rather than tacking back and forth into the sky as she had done. As he nears us my brother comes off his binoculars to guesstimate how high he is. He is higher than the Shard skyscraper, more than a thousand feet above the rooftops.
Less than a minute later he is heading northwest much more purposefully. Where he had not needed a single wingbeat to gain height he is alternating fast glides with three or four rapid cutting strokes of his wings, which resemble in shape the falx, or sickle, that gives that genus of birds their name. He is rapidly diminishing in our binoculars, even though both the big SLC and the old Nobilem Spezial are pretty high magnification, and we hope he will turn before he becomes a tiny flickering dot that finally winks out on us, as the female earlier had done. Fortunately he does not go quite that far. At what must be the boundary of his territory he turns and begins careering across the sky, climbing, then plunging sharply downwards for 250 to 300 feet, recovering, and sweeping upwards. I'm not sure whether he was after something at first, but as he launches into a second near identical stoop I had to assume he was showing his ownership of his territory - or could it be that he was throwing himself into these acrobatics for the pure exhileration of doing so? I have seen other birds flying in similar fashion here and elsewhere, always a privilege to witness whether against a leaden English sky or the blue Mediterranean heavens. After four or five of these spectacular sequences he takes off homewards at a speed that is itself nearly as impressive as his earlier acrobatics. He doesn't fly straight back though, his image in our binoculars shrinking as he gets a little further away from us, and as he enters an area of lower thin cloud he vanishes for a couple of seconds at a time. Finally he performs a short final display flight near his nest building and lands up on the ledge. The time now is 1215.
1330. My brother alerts me to a bird over one of the other big city buildings. It's soon joined in the air by another and both begin circling, the tiercel about 150 feet or so higher than the female. They begin circling closer together, and then the tiercel puts in his first stoop, at a shallow angle and fairly lazily, at the female. Both birds, yet again, begin rising as their circles bring them closer together and further apart. After the tiercel puts in one or two more lazy stoops the pair pick up their pace, the tiercel rising faster and stooping with more panache, more steeply and at greater speed. Then both birds are stooping downward together and chasing each other across the steel-grey sky, one bird just ahead of the other, then after several seconds of high-speed flying, falling back to become the chaser. Up they go until they reach the zone where the cloud layer begins, still chasing each other, appearing and disappearing like ghosts in amongst the lower reaches of thin cloud. A bigger problem than the cloud is the direction they are heading. At 1350 they disappear over the roof and cannot be relocated. Urrrrgh.
April Fool's Day
1115. At our usual viewing point. Cold (about 7 degrees) and damp, thanks to the rain that had fallen in the morning and over most of the last two days; sky very grey, but visibility into the distance pretty good. Practically no wind forecast - a good thing in one respect as the wind chill can be vicious, but without at least a bit of wind over the city, would they prefer to sit on their perches, rather than take to the air?
We start scanning the sky, on the hunt, going from one silhouette to the next as we search for the one target we are looking for amongst the many birds soaring or flying over the city. All the city gulls (herring gulls, black-headed gulls and lesser black-backed) are too long-winged and have a different manner of flight. Common buzzards (none of these are sighted today) are broader and longer-winged, and soar in a much more relaxed manner. A single domestic or feral pigeon can fly in the right way, with fast powerful wingbeats, but is shorter-winged, and most of the high pigeons we see will also tend to shift in their flight as they commute across the city, rather than fly in the direct manner of the bird we are after - which is also a good reason for them to fly as they do, never flying in a direct course for too long...
1150. I sight the first target I've spotted this stint just over a kilometre or so out from our position, over one of the many cranes engaged in construction work across the city. At this distance there is no mistaking what it is, and we can see it is visibly smaller and thinner-winged than the female my brother had spotted earlier. He goes over the building upon which his mate is probably sitting tight on eggs deep in her sheltered ledge, then comes closer to our position, gaining altitude as he does. Despite the windless conditions (at least at ground level), he, like the female earlier, has no trouble climbing high into the grey April sky - indeed, smaller and lighter, he goes up even more effortlessly, circling upwards rather than tacking back and forth into the sky as she had done. As he nears us my brother comes off his binoculars to guesstimate how high he is. He is higher than the Shard skyscraper, more than a thousand feet above the rooftops.
Less than a minute later he is heading northwest much more purposefully. Where he had not needed a single wingbeat to gain height he is alternating fast glides with three or four rapid cutting strokes of his wings, which resemble in shape the falx, or sickle, that gives that genus of birds their name. He is rapidly diminishing in our binoculars, even though both the big SLC and the old Nobilem Spezial are pretty high magnification, and we hope he will turn before he becomes a tiny flickering dot that finally winks out on us, as the female earlier had done. Fortunately he does not go quite that far. At what must be the boundary of his territory he turns and begins careering across the sky, climbing, then plunging sharply downwards for 250 to 300 feet, recovering, and sweeping upwards. I'm not sure whether he was after something at first, but as he launches into a second near identical stoop I had to assume he was showing his ownership of his territory - or could it be that he was throwing himself into these acrobatics for the pure exhileration of doing so? I have seen other birds flying in similar fashion here and elsewhere, always a privilege to witness whether against a leaden English sky or the blue Mediterranean heavens. After four or five of these spectacular sequences he takes off homewards at a speed that is itself nearly as impressive as his earlier acrobatics. He doesn't fly straight back though, his image in our binoculars shrinking as he gets a little further away from us, and as he enters an area of lower thin cloud he vanishes for a couple of seconds at a time. Finally he performs a short final display flight near his nest building and lands up on the ledge. The time now is 1215.
1330. My brother alerts me to a bird over one of the other big city buildings. It's soon joined in the air by another and both begin circling, the tiercel about 150 feet or so higher than the female. They begin circling closer together, and then the tiercel puts in his first stoop, at a shallow angle and fairly lazily, at the female. Both birds, yet again, begin rising as their circles bring them closer together and further apart. After the tiercel puts in one or two more lazy stoops the pair pick up their pace, the tiercel rising faster and stooping with more panache, more steeply and at greater speed. Then both birds are stooping downward together and chasing each other across the steel-grey sky, one bird just ahead of the other, then after several seconds of high-speed flying, falling back to become the chaser. Up they go until they reach the zone where the cloud layer begins, still chasing each other, appearing and disappearing like ghosts in amongst the lower reaches of thin cloud. A bigger problem than the cloud is the direction they are heading. At 1350 they disappear over the roof and cannot be relocated. Urrrrgh.
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