A very busy day today started with a breeding bird survey north of Preston at
4.30am, then onto Martin Mere for dragonfly and bittern surveys. After the
bittern survey I was walking past Woodend Marsh when the calls of gulls drew
my attention to a raptor soaring quite low overhead which turned out to be a
dark morph honey buzzard.
I watched it for a couple of minutes gradually ticking off
all of the identification features, tail bars, underwing pattern etc., and generally enjoying such a good view of a honey buzzard, before
eventually I remembered to get my camera out, but by then it was climbing
higher and moving further away, and the best I could get was this poor photo.
Still identifiable from the photo but just a shame I wasn't a bit quicker with
the camera. Can't complain though, a very decent record for this area and my
first self found honey buzzard, and an especially pleasing find because I'm
not particularly familiar with dark morph birds.
Even without seeing the plumage details, you can see it's a honey buzzard from the photo. A nice long tail, rounded at the end and a protruding, slim head, wings
pressed forward with wing "arm" appearing bulging and wider than the "hand"
are all obvious in the photo and all good pointers to honey buzzard.
I was surprised at how dark it was, almost black or very dark brown, with no hint of the pale breast bar of common buzzard. Obviously difficult from this photo, but in the field I could see that even the underwing was very dark, the only pale areas were on the hand, and I wonder if this was actually the translucent base to the inner primaries which I'm told would make this a female.
It was an interesting dragonfly survey, with eight species recorded, including
black-tailed skimmer, four-spotted chaser, emperor, brown hawker and these
emerald damselflies.
I saw several conehead bush cricket nymphs in the grasslands on the marsh.
Green sandpiper on Woodend marsh.
2nd summer / 3cy Mediterranean gull.
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