A BOPping day and now only two to go!

After many days of wind and/or rain the more settled and sunny weather today looked like it could be good for  birds of prey (bops). I checked out my breeding birds first. The two Honey Buzzard chicks are now a month old and growing quickly but still have at least two more weeks until fledging. To highlight how late this nest is, a migrating juvenile was seen at Huk today, see picturehere.

The young Hobbies have been out of the nest a good while but are not yet independent. They are good fliers and I have seen them catching dragonflies but they still spend there time waiting in tree tops for the parents to bring birds which results in lots of begging and chasing after the parents to take the prey.

 

The day’s highlight though came from some good old sky gazing in Maridalen. I had eight species of raptor with the first highlight coming whilst watching a male Honey Buzzard (the same as yesterday) right over my head which suddenly started calling. As we were away from the nest I thought maybe there was a flying juvenile nearby and scanned. But it wasn’t another Honey that had caused him to call but three other species that were all flying around him: Common Buzzard, Osprey and Goshawk! This was quite the sight and sound and would have rounded the day off very nicely indeed but the day was still young so I kept on scanning.

I mostly scanned with my naked eye as I've had enough of distant spots that I struggle to ID but every now and again scanned more distantly with my bins. I picked up a medium sized raptor heading south along the ridge 3-4km to the east. Switching to the scope I had it in a glide flight in profile and initially thought HB until it thermalled a couple of times and had a forked tail – it was a Kite. The distance was by now closer to 5km but in the scope I could see the tail was red and species #198 for #Oslo2024 was in the bag. That it wasn’t one of the species I had listed up yesterday showing that there is so much out there to see.

This is more fourth Red Kite in Maridalen, and Oslo, and each one is further away but I think I have now reached the limit for what is possible to ID.

 

Ebird checklist here.

 

I took far too many pictures today and many of them I think will be quite good. They will have to come later though as right now I have only had time to look at the absolute worst photos I took 😉

 

Red Kite (rødglente) at 4-5km range. Counts as a record shot IMO 😂