Tweeting

A few tweets from Holne, on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. Most of the action being from the kitchen window of our cottage, probably once a small barn, which we had rented for the week. Supplemented by walks on the road over the moor to the west.

When we arrived, there were some half filled bird feeders out on the back lawn of the big house, probably the original farm house. Filled up half way through our week. Not much action for the first couple of days, but on Monday we had some action for about half an hour, not long fully light, say 0700 to 0730. Just the one clear tweet of a great tit.

Later that day, getting on for dusk, took a walk on the road over the moor, that is to say towards Venn Reservoir, a mile or so to the northwest of where we were staying. Plenty of crows and magpies. Plenty of twittering from the bushes, but no small birds to be seen. No tweets.

Tuesday rather better, with some action from our kitchen window around 0845. Great tits, a robin and a nuthatch. This last counting as a proper tweet.

On Wednesday, took another walk on the road over the moor. Plenty of twittering to be heard. Some birds to be seen. No full tweets. But I did put up a probable buzzard from the bracken. There were also some probable skylarks. And a green woodpecker sized bird sat in a small, bare tree. But too far away to see clearly. So no score.

Could also see what looked like a small chunk of sunlit sea between the hills to the east. Perhaps Babbacombe Bay, north of Torquay. If so, more than ten miles away.

Thursday around 0815, some modest bird action from the kitchen window. Great tits on the feeders, one chaffinch on the ground, taking the food knocked down from the feeders.

Much better late that afternoon. Great tits, coal tits, robins and a couple of scoring nuthatches. Plenty of scoring chaffinches of various sizes on the ground. A crow comes down to wander about, very nonchalantly: not clear whether it was after fallen peanuts or chaffinches. In the end it wandered off having done neither and a magpie turned up to hoover up the fallen peanuts.

More of same on Friday morning. But later, drew a blank out on the moor.

In sum, the only confirmed sightings of note were the chaffinches and the nuthatches. We don't get to see chaffinches here in Epsom, but we do get the occasional nuthatch, most recently in May. See reference 1.

PS: the snap of a chaffinch above was lifted from the net. My telephone pretty useless at this sort of thing.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/hook-road.html.