.... more on the arrival of Winter.

...as promised more observations on the arrival of Winter.

Flocking tits...
flocking jays...
flocking pigeons...
flocking Goldfinches...
in fact,
flocking everything!

The birds are flocking, a winter trait among many species...
and we have large flocks of corvids... crows and jackdaws... 
milling around....
suddenly....
a tree will appear to loose all it's upper leaves...
and the 'leaves' leaving turn out to be a huge flock of Goldfinches that were blending in with the remaining foliage.

Simon of "Days on the Claise" observed last year a flock of corvids playing in the wind... and, despite the recent rain, our corvid flocks have been doing the same! Susan blogged about the same sort of  behaviour here in 2008.

The flocks of Lapwings are getting noticeably larger and the tit numbers are much larger than a week or two ago... and the warblers that were with them then seem to have moved on.

But perhaps, amongst all these flocking birds, the most spectacular have been....
the Wood Pigeons...
swirling flocks of a couple of hundred...
taking twenty or so minutes to pass the bedroom window...
when they are strung out as they move from one recently harvested maize field to another....

A very small part of a strung out movement of pigeons... open it in a separate window to view the numbers.
(I took three pictures to try and show the length... but they didn't stitch together.)

or in swirling clouds as they descend for a break in the poplars at the end of our meadow...
and then, without warning, exploding outward in all directions...
before assembling again, swirling around and settling...
a raptor had passed, probably, but I'd missed that.

Could have been the female Sparrowhawk...
or even one of...
or more probably, the local Goshawk.
We have had the occasional Peregrine...
all of which would love a tasty pigeon breast!
And it is the raptors that 'cause' the flocking...
it is a winter survival trait...
with the swirling mass it is difficult for the raptor to target an individual...
fish shoal for the same reason, but not seasonally.

Now we are watching out for the Cranes... they are on the move... a few flights have passed through Limousin... but they are massing at the Lac du Der to the north... 40,000+! So they are on their way south, too.

Old Friends

Yesterday on the way up the valley to Le Petit Pressigny we saw another osprey being mobbed by two crows. The Osprey - chocolate brown bird, white underneath - was not a lot bigger than the crows but with longer, narrower wings. It isn't just the fishermen who appreciate the regular re-stocking of the Aigronne, one of France's premier trout rivers.
Today we visited Beaulieu-les-Loches for the 'Fil et Bio' exhibition. Here we met an old friend - Jim the Mushroom Man, formerly of Leeds Farmers Markets and now based in Loches. He and his partner Philippe have 30 hectares of caves where they raise Japanese mushrooms - Shiitake, Oyster and Eryngii at the moment - and have just secured organic status. As well as Loches market, they sell from their shop at 45 Rue des Lilas.
Heading home, we saw and heard three young peregrine falcons spiralling around the steeple of the old abbey church, again being mobbed, this time by jackdaws.
Finally arriving home at 6:10 pm, it was almost dark and a little owl was calling. Then over the hill came a familiar trumpeting. A single crane grus grus (grue cendré) was heading south, grue-ue-ueing for his mates as hard as he could. According to the latest RSPB magazine, a bird can fly up to 70% further in V-formation than on its own, so this one could be in real trouble. We thought of several captions for this picture, such as "You fellows might have told me the clocks went back today!".