Shortie

As I was driving down the track on Rawcliffe Moss this afternoon to where I park to walk down to the feeding station I could see two or three corvids mobbing something that looked a bit Gull-like in flight, but I could tell it wasn't a Gull. I parked as quickly as possible, taking care not to brake too hard and slide in to the ditch, and leaped out of the car and got my bins on the mystery bird, and low and behold it was a Short-eared Owl! I'm not used to seeing 'Shorties' flying so high. The corvids gave up the chase and the Shortie drifted over Curlew Wood.

'Shortie' in the hand courtesy of Nigel

A nice start to what was yet another walk in the snow to drop some seed off. The snow was coming down fairly quickly, but the flakes were quite small and it didn't seem to be sticking much. A male Kestrel flew in front of Curlew Wood and I flushed two Grey Partridges from the hedge bottom. They in turn flushed four Yellowhammers from the Pheasant feeder. With the Yellowhammer was a single Tree Sparrow and Corn Bunting.

Looking through my bins towards the feeding station I could see there were more Tree Sparrows than a couple of days ago and when I counted them there were 110 plus eleven Chaffinch. Two buckets of seed and half a dozen apples were duly put out.