R and I went to Compton Verney today, to see the exhibition Bruegel to Rembrandt, which I enjoyed very much. We also had a decent salad lunch in the café, and then I left R catching up on emails and things and went off in search of the Great Crested Grebes.
For a few years either side of the pandemic there were regularly two pairs of Great Crested Grebes at Compton Verney, one pair nesting either side of the bridge. The pair on the farther side from the house had ambitions to move to the larger section of the lake, a notion which was strongly discouraged by the male in possession of that territory, and I used to enjoy watching and photographing their sallies back and forth under the bridge. On other occasions I also got to watch their courtship from the bank above the reed bed where they nested, and all of this made Compton Verney one of my go-to places for easy and reliable Grebe shots.
Sadly though, one of the pairs has since disappeared, and the remaining couple now have the run of the entire lake, making them much harder to find and photograph. Over the past couple of years they’ve had to contend with a family of otters which have moved into the park, and this year they seem to have decided to make a floating nest ten metres or so out from the bank below the house – a position which may well be easier to defend from predatory mustelids than a a nest with poor sight lines in one of the reed beds, but again, makes them harder to photograph. On the plus side, I got a lot of exercise, tracking back and forth around the lake and trying to sneak up on them, and I’m going to claim that this justified the large piece of carrot cake I ate afterwards.
During my wanderings, and repeated failures to get the photos I wanted of the Great Crested Grebes, I almost accidentally took several shots I do like of birds that appeared unexpectedly and flew right past me. The first was a a Grey Heron, which appeared from behind a large conifer so suddenly – and disappeared equally fast behind a coppice – that I literally got a single shot of the bird, while the rest of the burst contained nothing but sky. That one shot was a good one, and might have made it to this post, had the Red Kite not been more interesting by reason of whatever it’s carrying in its talon.
Is that… sheep fleece? Or fur…? I don’t know, but when the Kite appeared, flying towards me but still quite a distance out, it was carrying the stuff in its beak. As I continued to shoot, it bent its neck right under its body and transferred what can really only be insulating material for a nest into one talon, before continuing towards the trees under which I was standing. This was the last shot I got as it turned and went behind the trees, but it then circled round and landed in one almost behind me. There were too many intervening branches for me to be able to see it properly, but it seemed to be doing something with the wool or fur it had fetched, making me wonder if this was the site of its nest. When I go back to see how the Grebes are getting on, I’ll have to keep a special eye out for nesting Red Kites as well.
R: L2, C7, D7.
