One Of These Days....

Only the other day as we were walking off the marshes, I said to Rich "that Buzzard's been hanging around those bushes since the springtime, one of these days we'll find it in a net".

It doesn't take a genius to guess what happened today; I returned from a round of the reedbed nets to find Karen standing there looking like the cat that got the cream, with this beauty bagged inside her tee-shirt. (Sensibly, she'd taken it off first).

This was the second mist-netted Buzzard I've encountered, in both cases they've been lying on the ground holding onto the bottom shelf of the net with their talons. I vividly recall extracting the first of these myself and having a supposedly more important ringer take over and do the honours, so there was no question but that Karen would get to ring this one.

Note the seemingly random mixture of old and new feathers on the back and in the wings. Neither generation of tail feathers were of the juvenile type illustrated in Baker, and there were three generations of primaries, so this would appear to be at least a 2nd-summer bird.

Apart from that excitement it was a slow-ish morning, with only three more juvenile Whitethroats worthy of mention, and an early finish as the wind got stronger.