A close encounter of the Red-footed Falcon kind

 

With nothing that I really wanted to travel very long distance to twitch since my visit to the Elegant Tern in Anglesey last week, I decided to visit  Langford Lakes in Wiltshire today where a photogenic first summer female Red-footed Falcon has been for the past few days. I have seen the foresaid Falcon in England a number of times before but only distantly through my scope and so I don’t have any even half decent photos.

 

The Red-footed Falcon is the eastern cousin of our summer visitor, the Eurasian Hobby. It often favours similar wet habitats where it can find copious dragonflies and small birds to eat. It is normally found in eastern Europe and Asia as a summer migrant and it winters in Africa. Its conservation status is near threatened due to habitat loss in its breeding grounds. The Colins birding bible rates it as a one start rarity equating to “an annual vagrant in some numbers”. Moving even further east to Northern China, there is another cousin of the Eurasian Hobby and Red-Footed falcon, the Amur Falcon. This is an extremely rare vagrant to the UK with just two records. The first in Yorkshire in 2008 was only identified after it had left. I was fortunate enough to see the second during its brief stay in Cornwall in 2017.

 

Langford Lakes is run by the Wiltshire Wildlife trust and is located in the very pleasant village of Steeple Langford. Although this is close to where I grew up, I don’t recall visiting it as a boy. A quick google check soon told me why, the lakes were active gravel pits in the 60’s and 70’s. The approach road from the village is down the small Duck Lane onto a car park that I would guess could hold 30 cars maximum. There were a few parking spaces left when I arrived at 09:00 so I parked up and set off on the path between the two main lakes towards the meadows at the end of the lakes where the Falcon was located.  

 

On arrival I found a few birders located outside the hide peering intently at a tree where the Falcon was sitting. I ran off a few record shots but the results were not very satisfying as the bird was strongly back-lit. So I retired to the hide which was quite busy with local photographers but after a short while one left and offered me his seat. The view from the hide reminded me of Pit 60 before its sad demise, shallow water surrounding several small close by gravel covered islands where two fairly natural looking perches had been erected. I was told that the Falcon had been hunting for dragonflies in front of the hide before I arrived and had been using the perches to consume its pray. I settled down and waited and watched a busy Common Sandpiper on the closest island and two more distant Green Sandpipers on the far shore. After 30 minutes or so a shout of “here she comes” alerted everyone to the Falcon flying by the hide, swooping down to catch a dragonfly and landing on the perch in front of us. She was extremely dextrous with her talons. She quite happily balanced on one leg while holding the other up with the dragonfly tightly clasped as she tucked in. At one point an Osprey flew over momentarily grabbing our attention before we continued to watch our captivating wild falcon display.

 

After catching and eating 4 or 5 dragonfly, and to everyone’s great delight, she jumped off the perch onto the island and walked down to the shore for a cool drink of water. Catching and eating dragonflies was clearly very thirsty work! Just when I thought this wonderful experience couldn’t possibly get any better, she got in the water and treated us all to close up views of her having a bath. Her washing activities carried on for 10 or 15 minutes and then, all spruced up, she did a couple of circuits of the lake and flew off to perch on a distant pylon.

 

I had had 3 or so hours of views I could only of dreamed off and so decided it was time to slowly and very contently walk back to the car. 

 

I realised that the small Wiltshire village that I grew up in was only 10 or so minutes from the lakes and so I drove to what had been the  picturesque village of Hindon half expecting it to have been ruined with modern housing development. I was, however,  pleasantly surprised to find the village more or less as I had left it some 50 years ago when it had just 300 inhabitants . I drove by the Grosvenor arms pub where my grandfather was the landlord in the 1950’s and where I had spent the first three years of my life with my mum and dad before they brought their own small cottage just up the high street opposite the church. I was pleased to see that the little cottage that my grandmother lived in just up the road still had its thatched roof. I then drove the short distant to the other side of the village where my primary school was located expecting it to be closed but was again pleasantly surprised to find it still open. I left the village by means of a small single track road that I remembered walking up with my dad to see the Buzzards at nearby Cricklade which at the time was a considerable treat as they were much rarer then than they are today. The last part of the road, however, had been converted into a bridal way with no vehicle access – there can’t be many roads in the UK that this has happed to!! So I doubled back and onto the road to Warminster and onwards towards home in a very contented and mellow mood.

 

 

 

 

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!