.... 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.

Not exactly a bowling green

Our front lawn, such as it was, now looks like a scale model of a battlefield after an artillery bombardment. Meandering trails of tufts of moss and grass are punctuated by shallow shell-craters. This happened last night or early this morning – a quick surgical strike without collateral damage.

There’s a long long trail a-winding….

Speculation – what caused it? Sangliers (wild boar) or deer would have caused considerably more damage. Besides, any animal of any size approaching on foot would have to come in via the bridge or the field across more grass, so why there, surrounded by fences and walls? Voles are too small to achieve such destruction in such a short time. We suspect either green woodpeckers or jays, after leatherjackets and other grubs.

Well it wasn’t exactly a bowling green anyway

The mass of feathers under the spruce is the result of another type of monster altogether - we have had woodpigeons nesting there, and the sparrowhawk (probably) got one. We found the corpse of an unfortunate squab, too, and no doubt the rest will die too. Forgive me if I don't grieve over the loss of a woodpigeon or two, after what they do to our brassicas and soft fruit.