Swift Half update - 3rd October 2010

• Not a wonderful weekend's weather with my flood warning map showing red all over the place and more rain to come in the week ahead, yet in the brief bit of sun today I managed to see a late migrant hawker dragonfly patrolling the garden still...


• I haven't managed to get out to take any decent shots this weekend, due to the rain and a troublesome cough, which is a shame, because the squally weather is producing some dramatic skyscapes.


• Its not often though, one can say within 3 miles of one of the biggest towns in the south of England, in a built up area and in pretty dodgy weather, one can sit outside with a coffee (or lemon and whisky in my case today) and watch a red kite and a peregrine pass over the garden - in ten minutes!


• Well, the kites are well documented round 'ere. If you want to see properly wild kites -you can go to Gigrin farm in Wales, where they attract several hundred every day for paying photographers, by chucking bait around - or you can come to the M40 by Watlington (and south), where the kites aren't baited but are omnipresent anyway.


• The peregrines are less well known. I am lucky in that I've been recording peregrines in and around Reading for a couple of years now, after stumbling across one scaring the bejaysus out of the woodpigeons in a town centre tiny park (well, football pitch really) in 2007, right behind our terraced house. (It took me about a month of sightings for me to believe my own eyes!)


• We have five (I think) peregrines around this part of Berkshire - very often (as you'll see I've posted on before) one roosts on a building opposite Reading station - there's no doubt about it, peregrines are a real success story in the UK these days and can be seen in many, many town and city (with a cathedral or large tower block to roost on) centres.


• The shots of the peregrine accompanying this post are pretty poor admittedly - the bird was very high up. The third shot above was taken at 7x optical zoom and its still only a dot in the sky - the first two shots have been cropped severely so you can see the bird better!After 30 odd years of peering at birds and animals at distance, including birds of prey, I tend to spot something like this, pretty early, at distance and I am very lucky my eyesight still allows me to do so, at present! The peregrine over our garden this afternoon was a juvenile - one can tell that by the fact that its breast is vertically-streaked rather than horizontally-barred.