Hawkie revisited

There has been a lot of fog this week making birding difficult and uneventful but yesterday was nicer with some 5cm of fresh snow on the ground and I thought it would be a good day for watching the Hawk Owls. I hoped to see some hunting and wanted to film it so took my tripod with me but had not been smart enough to ensure the batteries on my cameras were charged. It wasn’t long before the battery indicator started blinking on the bazooka and then when I switched to the superzoom it too was also blinking as soon as I turned it on. These sort of rookie mistakes happen just a bit too often although my usual mistake is not pressing the record button when I want to film and then pressing it when I want to turn off the filming resulting in me filming the ground. Luckily that mistake didn’t happen today and I got some OK footage although not as much as I hoped for.

For the first time I saw both owls simultaneously although they were 300 meters apart. One of the owls had a lot of success hunting with three voles caught within the space of 40 minutes. It flew into the forest each time so I did not get to see it eat its prey but the first time I was able to locate it and it saw that it was hiding the vole in a tree for later consumption. This is the second time this winter I have seen Hawk Owl storing food which I don’t think is observed very often.

I watched the second owl for 50 minutes and whilst it was clearly looking for food it did not catch anything in that time. This second bird had a noticeably longer tail than the first bird which I thought would help in sexing it but according to BWP it is only bill size that differs between the sexes in Hawk Owl.

On Thursday I saw two Buzzards in the Dale which is the first December record ever.

Hawk Owl - this is the second bird with the long tail

the first bird with the vole it was hiding

with its second vole

and here when it caught the third vole

the second bird showing it does have eyes in the back of its head

Buzzard #1 on Thursday

and #2