Woah! On a holiday park in Houlgate, Normandy listening to owls. Cool!
After the disappointment of the reserve yesterday we walked down the river bank in Deauville today and amongst many gulls saw lots of little egrets. They are not a big deal these days but in this urban environment they were very approachable. I have never seen an egret hunting just ten metres away. More cool!
j
Today, on my way to a friend’s mama and baby deer crossing a major access road in the middle of the day. I would usually expect to see them early or late. Glad to report all the traffic stopped for them.
Today I saw a buzzard fly over a superstore*, heading towards an industrial estate. Five years ago this would have astonished me, but buzzards have done well recently, my guess is that numbers are way up, territory is limited - and now we are seeing urban buzzards. There are certainly plenty of rats and rabbits on that industrial estate. As I have noted before, one of the densest populations of peregrine falcons is in London, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
j
* - I don’t know what the US term would be. A huge grocery-cum-clothing-cum-electronics-etc-etc establishment.
Five whitetail deer feeding by the side of the road. (All does or their young, I think.)
Superstore is correct. The term was “invented” by a Sound of Music employee as they were turning their music stores into something called Best Buy, courtesy of tornado damage. Things were happening so fast for them that they forgot to trademark it. Best Buy is not a food store, but that is the origin of that term. I think of the grocery plus everything stores as hypermarkets, the inventor of which is Carrefour in France.
Nature was trying to freak me out today.
So, you eat fish.
This is normal. I expect you to eat fish. It’s what black-crowned night herons do.
You, black phoebe, eat insects. ‘Almost exclusively’ the books say. Okay, sure - Cornell claims you can catch small minnows. But I’ve never seen it. I am quirking an eyebrow at you.
Song sparrows? Nah, I gotta draw the line. You are not supposed to catch and eat fish.
Stop it!
I must have been discombobulated. The otter family definitely seemed to think I looked dubious at best.
Nice! +10 for pictures and narrative.
Great pics @Tamerlane! To be fair to the birds, I recently read something about observers discovering just how much meat the seed-eaters actually consume. And how many seeds the carnivores consume. Eating what is available.
Took a detour past Hedgecourt Lake today on the bike. I saw a swan shepherding five cygnets. Well, not exactly shepherding, because they’re all full-on adult-sized now. But raising five cygnets to adulthood? That’s some impressive swan parenting.
j
In addition to “superstore” you can also hear “big box” because the stores resemble really big, boxy buildings.
The technical term is “hypermarket” but I don’t think you see that outside of trade publications. And not even then sometimes.
If the fish are insect-sized the insect eaters will eat them.
It’s becoming more and more apparent that various wildlife have not read our guidebooks nor do they strictly conform to categories like “carnivore” or “herbivore”.
Woke to a treat this morning. Taking the house dog out for his morning constitutional, I heard a bull elk bugle in my pasture. In the not-quite-good-light, I walked out to be able to see around the trees, and spotted the herd smack-dab in the middle of my pasture. As they started moving up to the ridge, and along it, I counted at least 10. The bull bugled for me one more time before he followed the rest of his harem. They’re not normally down this far this time of year, normally see them about February. Unfortunately still too dark to get pictures, they were about 150 yards from the house.
There were also some hold-over doves at my bird feeder this morning, as well as one of the 3 valley quail families that call our property home.
I accidently brought some nature inside when I collected my cacti from the back porch (it’s starting to get too cool at night to leave them out there):
Google tells me this is a fall webworm. They turn into beautiful white moths.
Lucky you!
Another urban raptor story. Today we watched, in our neighbor opposite’s yard, a sparrow hawk ripping up and eating a pigeon. We didn’t see the kill, but watched for about 15 minutes as the sparrow hawk delicately plucked and then gorged on it’s prey. A couple of times a magpie approached, got stared at, and thought better of it. So far as we can figure, it must have been a female, as they’re bigger than the males and able to take down a pigeon (or, for that matter, a magpie - corvids are smart enough to know when to clear off).
We’ve heard quite a few stories of similar kills locally, and even found a tell-tale carpet of feathers in our yard once, but this was our first sighting of a sparrow hawk plus kill. For the record, we live in a pretty big town - not in the center, but not near the edge either.
Not quite so obviously urban, but yesterday we were watching cormorants fishing in Newhaven harbor. The thing that was so interesting was that I have never before seen cormorants fishing with so much intensity and success. It was literally: dive; surface with fish and swallow; big lungful of air; repeat. They spent so much time under the water (compared to being on the surface) that we couldn’t decide if we were watching 3 or 4. When we walked back past that spot about 40 minutes later, everyone was out of the water and drying off in the sun. I guess the fish were plentiful that morning.
j
A few years ago I arrived home to find a red-tailed hawk sitting in the middle of our backyard, feasting on a pigeon it had caught. It left surprisingly little mess when it finally flew off.
This one?
Around here people often refer to American kestrels as sparrow hawks, but of course they’re generally too small to take a pigeon 
.
Today we saw a Bighorn Ram on the road from Durango to Silverton. He was pretty calm as the cars drove by.
An exciting Saturday! First of all, we found this yellow rat snake in the barn. He’d gotten himself all knotted up in some plastic mesh out there, so I held him while my husband cut him loose, and then we drove him a ways up the road to set him free. He was a long fellow, six feet maybe.
Snakes weren’t done with us yet though. That afternoon, husband spotted an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake in our yard. I kept an eye on the snake for a couple of hours while we waited for one of our neighbors to come. The neighbor is a reptile breeder, and he walked right up to the snake, picked it up with a hook, and dropped it in a bin.
I got to take a picture of the snake which I can use for the monthly photo competition, so I’ll post the other one I was going to use here instead. Zebra Longwing butterfly.
Yeah, that one - thanks!
j