It's been a quiet week for photographs, and cold. There were goldfinches in the garden this morning (a relatively rare sighting, but not as rare as seeing a heron fly over the garden at the weekend). No photos of either of those, but I did take the camera out at lunchtime and headed to one of the nearby fields. In the distance a kestrel was hovering over the trees.
I kept an eye on it, and tried to get closer, but without too much luck. It moved lower in the air and hovered briefly, before perching for a few moments.
I thought my luck was in when it flew closer, and circled overhead.
It was a brief moment. The kestrel wasn't the only bird around. The trees where it had been hunting are frequented by various of the local corvids and although it wasn't too disturbed by the aerial antics of the jackdaws, it thought better of hanging around when a rook decided to intervene.
Rook chasing kestrel
Camera note: all shots taken with the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.
8 Comments
You have eagle eyes! (well, I hope not literally! :p)
The size difference between the rook and the kestrel is so marked!
Very nice photos!
Thanks Lois!
Vulpes, LOL! Bug-eyed maybe, but not eagle eyed. :eyes:
Adele, I find kestrels very deceptive. A bit like foxes in how they seem large from some angles but quite tiny from others. That one was being given quite a hard time by the rooks.
Lovely shot 🙂 You and your camera seems to be doing a good job tracking these birds.
I was surprised to see how large rooks were when I first spotted them. For a bird that isn't a raptor, it seems too upscaled :).
Brendan, the kestrels are the most common raptor round these parts, or at least the most common that stay fairly low. There are frequent spats between all the corvids (even the smaller jackdaws join in) and the kestrels, usually with the kestrel being seen off. For a hunter they have a hard time of it.