<\/span> <\/p>\nMagpies are at the other extreme and visually, with their elongated tail feathers, are among our more extravagant garden birds. Noisy too! We get plenty of pigeons (woodpigeons and ferals). This is a white feral pigeon, one of several that made a number of passes over the garden. I'm not sure what that strange pink mark is on its wing. And gulls… lots of gulls, including a couple of black-headed gulls. This photo is a herring gull, by far the more numerous locally. Most of the time all the birds behave in a fairly sedate manner, quietly or noisily going about their own business. Once in a while though they get spooked, and when that happens I scour the skies for the cause. It happened a couple of times today with the local starlings. This group were a little way off but their behaviour was distinctive. If you look in the lower section of the photo you can see why. It was too far off for a decent shot, but it was a sparrowhawk.
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Camera note: all shots taken with the Canon 7D 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":[980],"tags":[163,68,109,59,1154,34],"class_list":["post-2489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds-2","tag-dunnock","tag-gull","tag-magpie","tag-pigeon","tag-sparrowhawk","tag-starling","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t