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Message: <blockquote data-quote="halftwo" data-source="post: 1715982" data-attributes="member: 45720">A Peregrine PassesBriefly to Moore and big pale skies shuddering in cloud-blown breezes. Clouds of a thousand silky greys skudding and billowing brightly across the low sun.Meadows and hedges in browns - feeders tucked in hawthorns busy with Tree sparrows and Greenfinches, Chaffinches and Reed buntings making up numbers. Against the big sky large gulls in thousands specking the air from horizon to horizon, moving from estuary to tip and back. Buzzards tilting against the stiff air, circling and soaring.Then the flocks were up: hundreds of Lapwings a smudge across the blue, a gnat swarm of Starlings bunching and swerving, Wigeon up from the water curving tightly around the river's bend. A sky full. Gulls everywhere - but where their scarer?A Buzzard draws it: a Peregrine slices in, buzzes the buteo and continues its line across the tip, diving shallowly in acceleration. And gone. Against the giant stacks of the cooling towers two Buzzards are harrassed by a Raven. As they turn underwings flash silvery-fish in the sun. The Raven turns itself upside down as it goes for the raptor, flipping back and over again. Eventually the Raven joins its mate lower over the meadows and their 'cronks' reach me on the wind.But further on flocks are up again. A dozen Shelduck flap in jesters' colours and the Lapwings darken the sky once more. This time the cause remains invisible. Nearer a few Curlew preen by a pool in the crops.Up in vole-invisible heights a Kestrel turns and grabs the air to watch the marshes below, a Jay speeds to cover.By the car park distant drums: a Lesser-spotted woodpecker hails new catkins hanging on winter boughs, promises of spring to come.</blockquote>

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