First of all, a little background. i live on the first storey, so i can look down on to my garden, and i get good views at tree canopy level. i get better horizon views than i would at ground level. My garden is about 60 x 30 feet. When i first moved in a few years ago it was just grass. No trees, shrubs. Nothing. No birds too. Since then ive transformed it into a bird sanctuary, boasting 3 small ponds, a small firtree thicket (still short), a small wood containing one each of goat-willow, swedish whitebeam, hawthorn, baby beech, hornbeam, field maple, buddlia, holly, and two or three sycamores. the garden is bounded on one side by privet (untrimmed) and laurel on the other side, a 9' fence at the bottom. inside the fence is a lot of bramble growing with honeysuckle. i built a free standing wall of planks laid flat from a neighbours pulled down shed, which i call the bug-hotel. it is now covered with ivy and pyracantha, supported each side with stakes, and attracts a lot of insects and birds. it will rot there. there is a lot of rotting wood and ols stumps on the floor in the wood, and beneath the brambles i recently found a lesser stag beetle - so the rotting wood works. my garden is also home to frogs - lots of them, and every year they dump lots of frog spawn in the ponds. i occasionally get foxes, but so do all the other gardens. I live in the midddle of a housing estate, so other gardens surround mine, and houses, and its often noisy with neighbours. unfortunately, Cats are the big problem. they adore my wild garden with its ponds and wood and rotting wood, and they kill loads. and there are literally a dozen or so cats visiting my garden.
The river Blackwater runs inland from the Blackwater estuary about 10 miles distant at Maldon. I see a lot of birds of prey over my garden and my theory is that they use the river as a navigatoin aid coming inland as far as Chelmsford, where the river peters out, hence the unusual amounts of birds of prey. Perhaps thats just a fancy, perhaps its not unusual at all. where i live is part of a buzzard corridor. Anyway, thats roughly it for the background.
9/5/2009
This afternoon i nipped into the garden to have a go at taking photos of swifts in flight. It was warm and one or two flocks of swifts were screaming around fairly high. It was while i was looking around for suitable swifts to photograph, that i saw my first hobby of the year, over to the east. It was roughly the same height as the swifts. I managed to get some shots of the hobby, before it plummeted like a stone out of sight behind council houses a street away.
I knew it wouldn't be long before i saw my first hobby of the year, and it was likely to be flying around over my housing estate. I suppose the hobbies have always been there, but i didn't see my first hobby until a couple of years ago, on farmland near where i live. Then for the past two summers i've seen them hawking overhead and through the gardens at awful speeds, looking, yes, like large black swifts. I usually see one at a time, but i know there's two, because i've seen them hunting together before.
So today's hobby makes it 113 species for the year (everywhere, not just in my back garden), and 15 for what i can see from my house this month. It would normally be higher but i haven't been paying much attention this year so far.
To see the hobby i saw today go to my photo gallery. It's not a good pic, but it was really out of range of my 500 ml lens.
It felt great to see it. A buzz. Now i know the hobbies are back, i'll sit for hours gazing out the kitchen window, hoping to get a glimpse of this magnificent "big swift."
About 15 minutes ago i was in the back garden feeding the birds. Abruptly i heard the blackbird's alarm call and looked up. Above my head a few feet up i saw a couple of birds race overhead and assumed they were blackbirds. I turned around and saw a sparrowhawk flying away, struggling against the wind and it obviously had something, probably a fledgeling blackbird. I did not see the persuant blackbird - it probably gave up the chase. I know it's nature, but i was angry with the sparrowhawk and felt sorry for the blackbirds. Last year i heard a bird screaming in the hedge and went to investigate - i disturbed a sparrrowhawk, which flew up from in the hedge and sailed over the rooftops - a starling, scared to death flew out the end of the hedge. I was glad i saved it. I was angry with the sparrowhawk that time too. Once again , i know it's nature, but i get attached to the birds i see around the garden every day.