 |
| Bittern Wars!!! |
· Hobby, a regular, recurring activity done for pleasure, relaxation, or personal enrichment during one's leisure time
· Hobby, a fairly small, very swift falcon with long, narrow wings
· Obsession, a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling
On Thursday this week, following some excellent intel from my birding friend Ian Bollen, I visited the RSPB reserve at Langford Lowfields. I planned to spend the morning hopefully photographing Hobbies and then relocate to Frampton RSPB in the afternoon.
As the Hobbies don’t really get going until midmorning when its warmed up a bit and their insect prey is a bit more active a silly o’ clock start was not required. So after a fairly relaxed 2 hour drive with a coffee break I arrived in the car park around 9 am and made my way to a raised area called Corf Castle as recommended by Ian.
Mid-May is an excellent time to watch Bitterns as the females are busy making feeding flights for their recently hatched young. And so it was prior to the Hobbies waking up that I was treated to a number of really stunning views of the Bitterns in flight.
This usually secretive member of the heron family was in serious trouble in the UK due to the destruction of its wet reed land required habitat. By 1997 just 11 booming spring males were recorded leading to fears of its imminent UK extinction. Stirling work by the RSPB and other UK nature charities in restoring ancient wetlands has helped them recover such that a very gratifying 283 booming males were recorded by the RSPB in 2025.
While waiting for the Hobbies to wake up I watched a flock of Egrets rather precariously perched in some distant trees. In amongst them were a few Cattle and Little Egrets such that it was possible to get all 3 recent UK colonists in one scope view. This would have been totally unthinkable going back some 30 years when all 3 were real national rarities. I guess there has to be a few winners from climate change driven by man’s wonton disregard for planet earth.
Around 10:30 the Hobby action started which went on pretty continuously for the rest of the time I was there. At one point 5 of them were in the sky together. This beautiful but relatively scare falcon is always an exciting bird to see in flight, with its scythe-like wings, deftly hunting dragonflies or hirundines over wetland sites and lowland farmland. It is migratory spending the winter in Africa and arriving back in the UK to breed from mid-April onwards.
The Hobby was once a very rare and localized species strictly confined to southern England, but it has bucked the trend and undergone a massive population boom and range expansion over the last few decades with some 3000 breeding pairs recorded in 2025. Historically, it faced heavy persecution from egg collectors and gamekeepers, as well as significant habitat loss such that it was teetering on UK extinction at some 100 pairs. Another example that, given appropriate protection, mother nature can recover.
Here is an interesting factoid about the Subbuteo tabletop football game. The inventor, Peter Adolph, was a keen ornithologist and originally wanted to name the game "Hobby". However, because trademark offices deemed the word too generic, he used part of the bird's scientific Latin name, Falco subbuteo instead.
Another "one I took earlier" a close up of a perched Hobby from Standlake pit 60 a few years back.
While watching the Hobbies I was treated to a truly amazing, and almost certainly once in a lifetime , ornithological experience. Three Bitterns were flying over the reedbed, I think two males and a female. I assume one of the males was partnered with the female and the other was an interloper. This led to an aerial confrontation between the two males. The lower male somehow almost froze in flight and attempted to attack the upper male which responded by reaching out with its claws. Although a little distant, I managed to capture the whole encounter as per the headline photo above. The lower male seemed to reveal its dinosaur heritage looking more like a ferocious Paradactyl than a Bittern!
Buzzing from this astonishing experience I had a late lunch and made my way to RSPB Frampton.
My late afternoon walk around Frampton was, in all honestly, rather uneventful. I searched for but was unable to find any of the Stilts that had been reported that morning. On the way back to the car park a volunteer told me that the adult American Golden Plover had just landed right outside the visitors centre . By the time I got there a Lapwing had flushed it and it had disappeared somewhere into the distant grasslands. I’ve seen them before so it wasn’t a big deal.
On my way home I marvelled at my Bittern wars encounter, probably a once in a lifetime experience, but I was so very grateful to have witnessed it.
Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!
Comments
Post a Comment