I caught a glimpse of this yesterday but today it lingered a little while on our shed. the chest plumage was actually more mustard /orange coloured than these pics show. What is it? Sparrow Hawk?
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Reckon so
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Looks quite small in the pics but it was easily Magpie /Jay sized
Looks like a female sparrowhawk to me.
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Not a very good pic ( cloudy day through a window with my phone) but the wood pigeons have been going crazy on the ivy on the walls these last couple of weeks. No other birds seem to bother but the pigeons are regular visitors.
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They feed on the ivy berries, Kev.
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I’ve been researching ducks with the boy. We have a male Mandarin duck on the lake:
And he’s paired up:
But looking closely at the female:
I think it’s a wood duck.
Can anyone confirm? All photos by the boy, who is getting rather into this.
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No, but what wonderful photo’s
Next door appears to have crows or rooks nesting in/on their chimney
It does look more like a female wood duck
Yeah that’s the video I used to identify it as a wood duck
Yes, it appears to be a female wood duck.
However, Male mandarins have been known to hybridise with female wood ducks (It could be a hybrid female)
The resulting (female) hybrids show characteristics of both parent species. It’s a minefield where ducks are concerned for the following reasons…
- All mandarins seen in the UK are descendants of escaped or released birds
- It is quite likely that 99.9% of wood ducks seen are also escapes, or descendants of.
- Hybrids are not always easy to identify (DNA often required as proof)
- Ducks will fuck any thing. Fact.
It’s great that your boy is getting into this, maybe you should consider asking him if he would like to join Herts Bird Club | Herts Bird Club Welcome County bird clubs are always delighted to accept junior members and are normally very willing to give tuition.
If I was pressed, I would have to side with female wood duck.
Probably…
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“I’d like to join that club thing then”
-Sends detail and link
“They’re all, like really old…”
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Certainly the people on the committee will not be teenagers, they will be people with vast experience and knowledge, which they can and, far more often than not, will pass that on to the younger members.
If he wants to learn and improve his identification skills and fieldcraft, who better to learn from but those who have been there and done it all. They will have made many mistakes in their youth and will help him avoid the common pitfalls.
Birding is ALL about experience in the field. You can read every book published, watch every video and repeat ad infinitum, but it will never ever replace fieldwork. Taking pics and identifying them online when you get home is fraught with danger of misidentification.
He may not want to take this route but I’m certain it would be the one I would take if I had the chance at his age.
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I wonder if as an interim step, something like YOC membership might be good.
Maybe.
The advantage of County Bird Clubs is that there will be loads of good birding sites that will be well known to them and they will be happy to share that knowledge. Many of them have organised field trips too.
I know the YOC will have similar trips but at a National level, rather than local.
Ooh, just spotted a European Green Woodpecker sitting on a fence post in the garden, annoyingly he flew away before I could get a photo.
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Still practising on common birds (tbh that’s all there is until the spring passage migrants start to arrive)
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That new camera and lens are remarkable.
I just looked at one of those starling photos on Flickr, I don’t know how far away you were but the detail is amazing. The colours and details of the feathers are fantastic,
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