{"id":1608,"date":"2010-04-15T23:04:39","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T22:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1608"},"modified":"2013-11-10T23:48:30","modified_gmt":"2013-11-10T23:48:30","slug":"a-red-letter-day-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/a-red-letter-day-3\/","title":{"rendered":"A Red Letter Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

It's been a great couple of days for raptor sightings. Yesterday was good. I'd gone in search of the woodpecker again. I had no luck with that, but did come across a group of buzzards.
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There were four them out together, and although they will be tiny in this shot I did manage to get the group in one frame.
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If that wasn't enough, high above them in the stratosphere (well I exaggerate, but not a lot), a lone peregrine was surveying the sky.
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Those shots were taken in dreadful, overcast light and barely do justice to the subjects. <\/p>\n

Today the light was much better. I only had brief moments to get out with the camera. Brief, but productive. I'll come to the main sighting in a moment, but as a rapid follow-up to the female blackbird in the previous post I finally got a male blackbird on the wing, albeit only just!
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There was a squirrel as well, but the in-flight shot of that was more of a blur than a photo. I had better luck with a sparrowhawk though.
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All the previous shots pale into insignificance when compared with a grabbed shot I took early this afternoon. I had just finished a meeting and was outside de-briefing with some colleagues when something in the sky caught my attention. I'm prone to that… always half an eye on the sky. It must drive people mad, but sometimes it's worth it! It was high up, and at first glance looked like a buzzard. I grabbed a couple of quick 'reference' shots and thought nothing more of it until I uploaded them this evening.
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The forked tail is the giveaway. That's no buzzard. It's a red kite :faint: Yes, a red kite… in Sussex!<\/p>\n

I've seen these before, but always much further west (Reading, west of London is a good spot for them). There were one or two reports last year that they had extended their range in this direction, but despite my constant sky-gazing I hadn't seen any in East Sussex. Red kites have done extremely well in other parts of the country, but sightings this far south have been vanishingly few so to see one today was an absolute delight. It is sufficiently unusual that I've reported it to the local Ornithological Society. I've also checked a few other reports and there have been isolated but recent sightings in a 20 mile radius around here. If the red kite has indeed finally extended its territory to the South Coast then we are in for a treat. They are absolutely beautiful birds, wonderfully photogenic if you can get close, and provide amazing aerial displays. <\/p>\n

Absolutely a red letter<\/s> kite day…
\"Nature<\/a><\/span>
Camera note: all shots taken with the Canon 40D and EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[990,980],"tags":[51,179,302,433,1154],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-of-prey","category-birds-2","tag-blackbird","tag-buzzard","tag-peregrine","tag-red-kite","tag-sparrowhawk","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}