The Triumph Dolomite Club - Discussion Forum

I have seen many buzzards in my time and yes some of them are almost completely white but they have broad wings that upturn into feathered ends.
This bird was white with a black stripe through its eyes it had a black stripe across its tail and black speckled on top, and we had bin,s with us so got a good look but no pictures. the other non buzzard was the fact that from the middle of its wing it went down not up as in a buzzard.
We also have many red kites here but they are easier still to identify with their flappy wing movements and shape.

Jon, it does sound like you saw a migrating osprey on its way to west Africa.
Their numbers have increased steadily since the fifties but are way, way down on the numbers in Victorian times when
persecution lead to their extinction as a British breeding bird.

The confusion with buzzards is perfectly understandable. As it is with golden eagles too.
However, once you have observed each in flight telling them apart becomes less difficult.
The further north and west you travel in mainland Britain the more common buzzards become.
Apparently they are now more numerous (but not as widespread) in Britain than the kestrel.
I think the buzzards' success is due to their adaptability and opportunism, especially when it comes
to food. They tend to avoid urban areas.

Yes your so right Ian about confusion of species. It would seem that Buzzards are one of the great success stories as indeed they are everywhere down here too, yet when I was a child I had only ever seen them in the West country.
The Andover hawk conservancy have informed me that the Osprey we saw was most likely a female as these are the first to make their way down to Senegal and will feed up here (hence following the Meon river) and fly down via the bay of Biscay and will take her about 45 days.
Maybe it will be the only wild Osprey Diane and I will ever see.

time for some australian wildlife, too much talk of tits, warblers and mallards on here


coupla' kangaroos (eastern greys) in the vineyard. We get visits several times a year, the farmland and scrub surrounding us is home to a few mobs. farmers tend to shoot 'em but they don't do that much damage. The biggest problem is hitting them on the road where they make a mess of a car. The roo doesn't like it too much either. I've hit three so far. Two had to be despatched and the third hopped off.


hard to get close to them, very skittish. This would be a mother and joey pair, with another joey probably in mum's pouch, just starting life. The vineyard is green due to the recent rains.


this beauty I found under a sheet of corrugated iron. It is a blue tongue lizard, very common reptiles. So named for its fat blue tongue. Held here by my 15yo son. they eat flowers, snails and are quite harmless, although when they bite they latch on pretty hard.


and again. This is one of about 6 in the garden, probably the biggest. Very good condition, fat tail, scales all good. It makes me sad to find them on the road out the front of our house, they tend to like the warmth of the road in the early morning or late afternoon and in the shadows they are hard to spot. No snakes so far this summer, we usually get a few, usually Brown and Tiger snakes, never had a problem with them so they get left alone.

stu

Hi Stu.. Is that the 'Common' Brown snake that you speak of? I remember the great Stevie Irvin educating me a little on the tv about those.. Wow, a beautiful but dangerous beast to have in one's garden!. All we have is the occasional Hornet!

Australia..a fantastic place for extremes..

Yes Stu,
you are so lucky to live there and have these fascinating creatures to see, when I was a child I was so dissapointed to live in England where there are not many varieties or amounts of reptiles. However it could be worse, I could live in Ireland where there are no snakes due to the last ice age seperating them from us. (unless you believe that St Patrick banished them hence earning his Saint status )

aye, the common brown is the one. This unfortunate fellow met the backhoe when a tree came down in the back yard and needed removing around 18 months ago. I'd already seen him and let him go when working around the yard. You normally wouldn't know they are there. I was sad when the backhoe operator pointed him out after killing it.



while very poisonous, they can't inject easily through jeans or work clothes and the hospital is a mere 45 km away and carries all the get well stuff.

The ones we find at the school don't survive though, they live under the buildings and come out to bask on the warm pavers, where the kids spot them and the grounds person goes into overdrive. Tiger snakes are reckoned to be the most aggressive, but they just wriggle for cover if you let them. Had several around and in the house, one slithered past my son when he was a toddler while he was playing inside the house and disappeared in a crack in the skirting board (the house is floorboards on joists.). the whole place was sealed up after that

Steve Irwin was a freakin' legend. watching him handle lizards and snakes was incredible. The blue tongue above likes its head held up with a finger under its chin and if you hold him gently, he relaxes after a while. I've only been bitten once (deliberately, by a small one, to see what it was like) and it smarted a bit

we see a lot of big wedge tailed eagles here, always too high up to get a decent picture though. I've seen a few on fence posts but they swoop away if you get too close. We normally stop and remove roadkill away from the road as the poor buggers sometimes scavenge on it and get clouted by cars. The number of boobook and tawny frogmouth owls we lose at night is depressing. Lots of black winged kites, spur winged plovers (stupid buggers lay eggs on the ground next to the road) and this is the season for rainbow lorikeets (they don't help if you grow grapes), Corellas (noisy horrible things) and sulfur crested cockatoos (huge big things that flock around and lay waste to sporting ovals). The Red tailed black cockatoo is endangered and is sometimes seen hearabouts. Magpies and ravens (often mistakenly called crows) are also very common. Unfortunately my shed has attracted some wattlebirds who have decided to nest in the roof trusses. hard to tell them it gets very hot up there and each year they lose their chicks from the heat. Anyway, enough rambling, I'm starting to sound like a dotty englishman.

stu

sorry Jon, I was posting while you were, it'd be sad if we lost all our snakes due to some interfering do-gooder

Your last point well taken Stu
It is a great shame that snakes are so feared by ignorant humans as their venom can also help us, especially with heart diseases.
In Corfu the locals will kill any snake no matter what and are most frightened by a harmless whip snake that they think is the most venemous animal on the planet
Like your attitude Stu.

It has been a year, so the time has come to resurrect this thread ......

Today I was fishing at Longberry near Wick (sea fishing off the rocks that is) and whilst doing so I became aware that I was
being watched by a well camouflaged bird sitting on the rocks less than 12 feet away, a Little Auk.
Although these auks are one of the commonest birds in the Northern Hemisphere they are rarely seen outside the Arctic.
This one was resting, obviously being tired. It has been a victim of the recent NW storms, being hundreds of miles from its normal
wintering grounds (possibly the Denmark Strait or southern tip of Greenland).
It was not frightened at all, very possibly never having seen a human before.
They breed in cliff crevices on islands in the High Arctic in enormous colonies. One of the more accessible sites on Spitsbergen
stretches some ten miles and is estimated to have between 3 and 5 million birds!
They really are little, being no bigger than a starling.

Also today I saw a gull from the Arctic, either a Glaucous or an Iceland Gull. These are very difficult to distinguish in flight but it
looked to be the same size as the Herring Gulls flying alongside which points to the former, the latter being just slightly smaller.

Nice one....
Also had a recent garden first spot for me too....
Sadly only a coal tit or rather a gang of them. We get plenty of blues and greats but I havent noticed a coal before. Quite a bit noisier which is what made me look up. There are quite a few long tailed ones in nearby Bushey park but they've never made it to my garden either.

Jonners

Blooming hell I used to live in Walton and it was a treat to go to Bushey park .

Our neighbour has left last summers giant thistles standing and flocks of goldfinches have been visiting to eat the seeds so I am going to plant some in our garden too as these micro parrots are such a sight.

bit more action on the snake front here. Walked into the kids playroom to find what I thought was the kids toy rubber snake on the carpet. Turns out it was alive and well. It slid away under the computer desk where we were able to corral it into a cardboard box. Brave 10yo held the lid down was about 4' long and light brown in colour, a venomous brown snake.
Took it up to release about a km away and tried to get a few more pics, but after sticking its head out of the top of the box, it escaped like greased lighting into the scrub.

next day, I had to dispose of a sheep in the same area (back of the dump) and almost rode the 4W bike over a much larger darker brown snake.

Yesterday the kids found another one lurking near the pool.

Onto safer things, found a wombat while returning from holiday in Qld. We had detoured via Mt Kosciuzko (tallest hill in Oz) to climb it and didn't get a pic before it disappeared into a drainage culvert. Not that common to see them except when they hit the car. The dawn journey up to Kossie was made hazardous by the hundreds of 'roos on the road. I've started a fitness campaign and regularly come across more 'roos around here in the morning.
Onto car matters, after Kossie we took the alpine way from Thredbo through to Khancoban in the family commodore, 80km of winding road. Retracing in reverse a journey I had made in the sprint in about '87. It took 1.5 hours and was a tiring exercise, the 18km walk up Mt Kossie beforehand didn't help.

Here's some footage of some squirrels on our window sills which I filmed from the kitchen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhEms21t ... ature=plcp

I've also seen robins and blue tits.

That's an impressive collection of different flavours of washing up liquid you have there, Toledo Man.

There are still quite a few red squirrels around here, which seem to be holding their own in the face of the big, angry grey ones. I had some of the latter in the attic when I first got this house and it took much bribery and quite a lot of vodka to shift the awkward buggers but we're all grey squirrel-free now and the reds often come into the back garden for a nosey at what's going on in my hut. They're lovely creatures.

Speaking of Robins... When my girlfriend last came to stay, I was extremely surprised to hear her say she'd never seen a Robin before!
There's always one (at least) in our garden!


These are our nearest neighbours, well three of them anyway, there's 5 in there currently.