A bird in the hand.......

I have talked about the garden's bird life and right now it must be at its peek. I understood that the Blue Tits should have all fledged several weeks ago, well my garden has no truck with such nonsense. Over the last few weeks we have had fledgling Blue Tits, Great Tits, Blackbirds, Green finches and Gold Finches all in and around our three little cherry trees. The parent Blue & Great Tits look particularly knackered and in most cases the fluffy fledglings all look bigger than their parents.

Every thing coming up smelling of roses.

 The Goldfinches are feasting on the shelled sunflower  seeds that I have put into the bird feeder and are even fighting off the Greenfinches. But here you can see they are pulling rank over the female Goldfinches and are making it quite clear that the girls should shove off.












 

I have only seen Percy the limping Pheasant once since he met a girlie but the birds of the year have been the Spotted Flycatchers which have completely taken over my attention, they are simply fascinating to watch. The pair have now laid and hatched their eggs to three, very noisy, little chicks and the feeding has been frantic. Despite all the different people using the garden, my mowing and too-ing & fro-ing they have doggedly carried on doing what parents do... shovelling food down their offspring's throats every moment of the day.

I have watched these Flycatchers and indeed as most of those that know me I have taken a lot of photos too. The parents use just 4 or 5 branches and perches to launch themselves off as they snap up a fly. Strangely they will rarely share a perch for more than a fleeting moment and if one lands on a perch whilst the other is on it the original occupant will swiftly more to another perch. They are an avian 'Tag-Team' if you will. The pair were continuosly flitting around the garden all day long.

I'm afraid that I am about to display a lot of photographs now. Most of them will be small but I would suggest that it is well worthwhile clicking on one of them to open the 'slide show' then look at them each a lot bigger as I am really pleased with the pictures.

A rare shot of the pair together on their favourite branch

They sit patiently watching for the movement of a fly or wasp or such like, then zoom they shoot off the branch reaching full flight speed in only 1 second within 3-4 seconds they are back on a perch with a fly firmly in their beak. They do have a habit of showing off what the have caught by sitting on the perch and keeping the stunned fly firmly in their beaks for sometimes over a minute or two. Sometimes the male gives his partner his catch from mouth to mouth. Perhaps I should try this with Alison, it would get the bacon rind from between my teeth!

 Of course once the chicks had hatched then the lions share was going into the nest.











I have been at great pains to keep away from the nest despite it being head height in my grape vine. I couldn't even prune the thing. However I did snap a few photos using my telephoto lens, paparazzi style (don't tell Levison). It is a very small nest built between the cottage wall and a thick vine branch and well hidden by vine leaves but in the darkness I could see three fat little Flycatcher chicks looking quite grumpy until they saw me then they instinctively opened their mouths wide for food in the hope that I had a dragon fly or something.
I withdrew.

 FEED ME!

So there we were. A happy family. The birds spending hours and hours posing for photographs, so I had to oblige.

On the mock orange

Strutting his stuff for his 'lady friend'.

On my trellis. What ever they perch on they poop on!

Still it gives the Loganberry jam an added zing!

Chewing on the Cherry Tree.

On the bird table.

In the Fig tree.

Now, and here I may not be believed and I leave myself open to being labelled a fantasist as the odds of what I saw next was beyond belief...
I came out of the back-door porch and a large bird shot over my head and straight across the branch most commonly used as a perch by the Flycatchers (the one shown just above, right). In an instant it was past this and as it swooped low over the garden wall I could swear that it had something in its talons. It was so fast that I cannot tell you what bird it was but only that it was a falcon, possibly a Kestrel. For once the garden was completely hushed with no birdsong whatsoever. The continual flow of birds to my bird feeders had ceased and no birds could be seen anywhere. There was silence. I immediately told Alison what I had seen and that I felt it might have taken a Flycatcher as it had gone right into the twig they perch on and which they fight off intruders from as this Goldfinch found to it's cost....

Only time would tell and so we went on with our lives and within 10 minutes most of the birds had reappeared along with the birdsong. Then the familiar sound of the Flycatcher brought me out to see my old friend, just the one bird but it was chirping away. A week passed and neither of us saw two Flycatchers at the same time. This was the longest that I had not done so and my heart became heavy with sadness for  it is looking more and more likely that perchance I happened to witness a killing! The trouble with the Flycatchers is that they move so swiftly that there can seem to be three or four of them sometimes, but it is an illusion and so I was not sure if I was just seeing one at a time or indeed if there was just the one bird, the problem is they do, did, look very similar to each other.

So there you have it. I think I witnessed a falcon taking out a Spotted Flycatcher just 4 yards from me. The other parent sings like crazy (perhaps in anguish) but between chirps it does feed the chicks. I suppose they may have had a row and she's gone off back to Africa to stay with her mother but at the moment it is an open verdict

The last photo with the pair together....

NOW THE TWIST...  Yep, after that, there's more.....

I came home from the allotment and noticed that the chicks chirping noise was no longer from the nest, which was strange as they looked far too small to be flying. Then I saw one of them on the lawn, looking desperate and forlorn, it was drenched from the pouring rain and calling to it's lone parent for food. I could hear both the other chicks calling but could not establish where they were.

I watched the lone adult trying to feed the chicks but the heavy rain meant there were few flies about and feedings were far and few between, although the chick on the floor did get fed a couple of times.

The feeding's were getting less and although I had locked my cat away we have had other cats and even stoats visit our garden, this chick was in grave danger now. You need to understand that this bird is at a RED status with the RSPB as it is in serious decline in Britain.

I really had no idea what I should do and Alison suggested we phone the North Norfolk wildlife trust to see if we should put it back into the nest.  I was given a contact number for a local rescue sanctuary that specialises in birds that have fallen from their nests ( http://www.wingandaprayerhaven.org.uk/home.html ) they instructed me to put it into the nest. When I explained that there was only one adult feeding them it was explained to me that chicks often leave the nest prematurely when they are not getting enough food. If feeding's were not happening every 30 seconds or so then these birds were in danger of starving and I should take them to their haven where they would hand rear them.

The last time that I or the chick saw the parent.

I put the lone chick back in the nest, all the other chicks had gone too. Within ten minutes this little guy was stuck on the lawn again and one other was flapping around the Cobnut and just managing to flap to the neighbouring Cherry tree. I saw the third one fly over our garden wall, it barely made it.

We decided to gather the other two up and take them to the rescue centre in the hope that the parent was still around and would hear the chirping of the one over the wall and put all of it's energy into feeding that one.
Alison organised the shoe box and I easily caught the grounded bird but despite the extremely repetitive high pitched chirping it took us ages to locate the second. Alison finally saw it on top of the Patio parasol and I sneaked up behind it and  captured it. It was tiny.

I then rushed them over to the sanctuary where they explained that they had never had Flycatchers before but they knew how to feed them (like Swifts apparently) and that when they are old enough I would need to take them back and release them from our garden as they need to be in habitat that it is known they can live in. Then in August they will migrate back to Africa or Asia. I can phone up and find out how they are doing (Not Africa, I mean the sanctuary silly) so I shall let you know in due course.

And now my garden feels empty. Alison and I both notice this and we miss the birds on their twig chirping away daily, swooping and diving as they catch a fly or two.



Perhaps one of their kids will return and start a family next year, who knows?

Add caption

Now if you click on the first photo on the blog (the Blue Tits head) then you will be able to see all the photos full size in a slide show format.


http://www.norfolkwildlifetrust.org.uk/Documents/Species-Leaflets/WF_Spotted_Flycatcher.pdf

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/s/spottedflycatcher/index.aspx



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