Wildlife Blog by Ron Allen – 28 November 2020

Saturday morning 28 November 2020  Buzzard in the mist.

This morning was cold with a slight mist and not much about.  Although, looking from the end of our garden towards New Buildings Farm, there was distant buzzard atop one of the telegraph poles.  I hurried back to the house to grab my camera and a 300mm telephoto lens and hoped the buzzard would still be present as indeed it was. Still rather distant for my lens but the image confirmed a buzzard and a little enlarging and cropping showed the bird up well.

The line of telegraph poles that stretches from the Winchester Road at the double bend south across to the farm provides regular perches for our local buzzards and are always worth a look from the road or from our footpaths.  Indeed the fence posts around the farm are often used by buzzards as are the high branches of the belt of oak trees between Furzefield Copse and the farm buildings. They are quite shy and seldom let you get close, although we did have one that perched in our garden a few years ago long enough to get a good view.

 

When we first moved here in 1980 we would never have seen a buzzard and they only started to spread across the county from a population in the New Forest in the 1990s. Today we can see them here in Stroud almost every day. Listen for their loud mewing call and in the summer they will be circling high above us in the thermals. Very often though, they are remorselessly being mobbed by crows.