The last couple of weeks the Great Spotted Woodpecker is a frequent quest at our birdfeeder. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon are his favorite times to eat some peanuts.

This picture shows a male Great Spotted Woodpecker, which can easily be recognised due to the red patch on the back of his head. A juvenile woodpecker has a red patch on its nape (not on the back of its head). The female woodpecker hasn't got a red patch at all. So, it is quite easy to tell who is eating all our peanuts today.

When the Sparrow-Hawk just a couple of days ago caught the house-sparrow in our garden, the juvenile woodpecker was feeding from the birdfeeder, which is only about one meter away from where the sparrow-hawk had landed.
He kept on hanging there stiff as a board, while the sparrow-hawk was plucking its prey on the ground. We could hear the juvenile thinking: "please, don't let her see me, please don't let her see me". The poor creature was hanging in there for at least 10 minutes before he was able to escape to a saver spot.

Almost every night when we go for a little scroll through the fields, we are treated with a sunset. And no sunset is the same!
Here the sunbeams reach out for the last time.

We were having an early diner (at around 17.00 hrs) when we suddenly saw all the birds in our garden take off. And at the same time we heard a loud scream which seemed to be the scream of a house sparrow. And then......suddenly there she was, in the middle of our small garden, with a house-sparrow caught in her claws: a Sparrow-Hawk.

She looked around for quite some time untill she finally declared the garden as 'safe' and started to pluck her prey. She was only about 8 - 9 metres away from us, but that didn't seem to bother her. Probably the insect-screen made us a bit invisible to her. We were able to shoot a photo of the Sparrow-hawk, but only through the insect screen. But nevertheless it is quite a nice shot.

In the fields near our house a farmer put up a nesting box for kestrels. This year there were two young birds on the nest. This is an image of one of the youngsters waiting for his parents to bring him some prey. The image by the way was shot with a Canon Powershot A640 handheld at the zoomeyepiece of a Zeiss Diascope (85mm). The bird was sitting at a distance of at least 100 yards.


Click to enlarge

Last week we shot a few images of green finches in our garden. This one is enjoying his meal at the bird feeder.