Let OsPrey

Adult Osprey - it's a 'record shot' so it doesn't
matter that it's really, really bad...apparently

A Bonelli's warbler at nearby Billinge Hill had encouraged me to get out early and look for some migrants. I wasn't dissapointed.  While looking down towards Rough Park Wood, scanning the bushes a huge raptor appeared. An Osprey!

I watched it for about an hour - just enjoying the whole good-bird-on-patchiness of the scene. It seemed in no hurry  to move on and it's possible that it  had been fishing in one of the nearby lakes.

I took a few distant 'record shots'.  As life is just like it is in the films, I was happy in the knowledge that when I got home I could 'digitally enhance' these - turning a faint, out of focus, blob into a beautifully crisp (probably prize winning) Osprey portrait. Movie spies are always doing this kind of thing - how hard can it be?!

The local Crows and Magpies were predictably unimpressed by this intruder as, lets face it, it's their patch as well as mine. After an initial bout of cacophonous cawing, the corvids changed tactics. I think they'd seen that part in Hitchcock's The Birds where they silently gather in numbers...looking all sinister and that.

I decided to walk round to the wood, hopefully with some judicious sidling I would get a bit nearer and get a better photo. Unfortunately I badly mistimed my entry into stealth mode. I had misjudged the position of the tree in question. So, like a Big Massive Idiot I flushed it, leaving me with some explaining to do...er...to myself.

Still, a great bird to have seen so well on the patch - the usual view of a migrating Osprey is as a brief, high flyover.

Two Tree pipits flew south calling as well a number of Siskins and four Sand Martins. There was also a southbound Meadow Pipit - my first 'Migging Mipit' of the  Autumn. Two flighty Song Thrushes contact called - these may well have been early migrants.

All these migrants were seen whilst Ospraising*.

* 'Ospraise' (Verb) to appraise an Osprey

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