Long-eared owls

A couple of weeks ago I spent a night down near Prosperous hoping to get a sighting of a family of long-eared owls that my mate Steve had discovered some time previous.  I met him down there and he took me to the site which is a few miles from the town.

It was about 9.30 when we got into position, and according to Steve we'd have to wait 'till about 10.30 for the family to appear, this he said was usually the time when the young would start calling and the mother would respond by periodically bringing food to them.

Dusk fell, the hands on the watch rolled around to 10.30 and just as Steve predicted the young began to call.  Brilliant, they were still present and with any luck we may get a show! 

Well, we got a show and a half.  Three young appeared out of the trees and perched on the walls of a ruin not 25 meters away from us.  In the fading light we got great views of the three young shuffling about the wall and calling loudly, presumably for the parents to bring them food.  This went on for perhaps 30 minutes at which point we heard a more distant call from behind the trees the young had come from and the mother (we presume) made her first appearance of the night.

What followed was a sequence of hectic activity, the young flying around and through the ruins, playfully and in full view for much of the time.  The little tufts on top of their heads sometimes just about visible against the backdrop of the darkening sky when they stopped for a breather and perched back up on the walls.  Eventually as the light was becoming just a little too dark to see very much unless they were in flight they moved further across the field to another ruin which gave us great views of them in flight.  They proceeded to replicate their behaviour of earlier and began flying in and about the second ruin in much the same way as before.

We hung around a little longer as we could still make them out against the night sky when they took flight, but alas the time came when it didn't look like they were going to head back in our direction and so content with what we had seen and heard we called it a night, packed up and headed home.

It was without doubt one of my top birding experience this year, I mean it doesn't always work out that you plan a trip and the intended decides to turn up and show for you, so to have three young and at least one parent decide to put on a show for a couple of hours was way above my expectations for the night.

Birding bliss...

Bird Atlas

The Bird Atlas finished up a few weeks ago and to be honest I'll miss going out for hours on end recording everything I see and hear.  I've really come to appreciate what a great county Meath is for not just birding but nature in general.

Okay I haven't recorded any mega's for the Atlas but I have pretty much recorded every species you would expect to see (and a few you wouldn't) whilst covering the county.  I had hoped to cover more at the beginning way back in '07 but after four years I can be happy with the contribution I've made.

I of course covered Ashbourne and the immediate environs of Donaghmore, Kilbride and across to the outskirts of Ratoath.  I also covered from Kilbride across to Bracetown and moving North in the county I covered some more tetrads up Skreene direction and again the surrounding areas up to Kentstown.

All the usual suspects cropped up as and when you'd expect but each field trip usually threw up one or two sightings which made the effort all the more worthwhile; short-eared owls, a cuckoo, an occasional peregrine or an even more occasional brambling and surely the record which most pleased  me.... a barn owl.

So what has four years of covering (and trespassing) as many lanes, fields and tracks around the county taught me?  We'll for sure some species are absolutely thriving in the county, namely all the corvids, the buzzard population, the pigeon and dove populations all appear not to have suffered too badly over the last two harsh winters.  But there's a pattern here isn't there?  They're all what you'd call large in size, not too many LBJ's in that list, so what about their smaller cousins?

Well I'd have to say the last two winters have been very tough on the county's population of small birds.  Some species have been notable for their lack of appearance over the last couple of years, notably the yellowhammer a species I could usually walk to any one of dozens of sites and be guaranteed a sighting and song but alas no more, sightings have become much rarer than once were.  Add to that list the greenfinch, blue and great tit, dunnock, wren, bullfinch, goldfinch..... you get the picture.  All of these birds were to coin a phrase I've used somewhere before "cheap as chips", not over the last couple of winter and breeding seasons they weren't.



House sparrow, Ashbourne



However one little brown bird, the house sparrow appears to have fared better than most!  I can't say I've noticed any great decrease in their numbers, perhaps there were just so many of them to start with that they have become a little more obvious over the absence of so many others, I'd like to think not, I'd like to think that somehow this most unassuming of the LBJ's managed somehow to beat the conditions.



Cuckoo and short-eared owls

It's been a while seen my last post but I've had all sorts goin on, hols (Spain, more on that in a later post), work, a laptop that died etc.

 Anyway pretty quite time of the year around Ashbourne so in recent weeks I haven't been out and about on the patch much but there was a couple of welcome visitors, namely a cuckoo near Kilbride and a couple of short-eared owls which I only had for about 10 minutes just off the N3 at Bracetown.