Dartmoor tweets

The cottage we use in Dartmoor, on the edge of Holne Moor, actually a converted cow shed, used to come with bird feeders outside the kitchen window - bird feeders which pulled lots of birds, some tweetable. Bird feeders which have been stood down this year, so kitchen window not so productive.

Much twittering in the hedgerows round about, but there are very few birds that I can identify from their twittering and none of these stayed visible long enough to do it the other way.

But we did get some chaffinches near the car park at Venford Reservoir. And we did get some swallows. The odd wagtail. And lots of magpies, enough of them that I can now recognise their shape and flight at quite a distance.

And then on the last day, I took a walk up onto Holne Moor, where I heard both skylarks and cuckoos. Either one cuckoo several times, or several cuckoos. There were also two birds which stopped on gorse bushes long enough to be inspected with the monocular and one I thought maybe a skylark, the other maybe a bullfinch, on account of a pink breast. The latter theory was soon knocked off as my bird had a thin beak, not the fat beak of a bullfinch.

Then today, I come across reference 2, from which I deduce that the first was a meadow pipit and the second was a whinchat. Both seemingly common on the moor, with the ground nests of the former being favoured by the cuckoo.

And another reason that the cuckoos like Holne Moor, is the scattering of small trees from which they can scan the ground for nests.

PS 1: there is a puzzle about Venford Reservoir, built in 1907 to supply Paignton, across the hills to the east. The reservoir would naturally drain into the River Dart (Dart for Dartmoor, as in Exe for Exmoor), which eventually flows into the sea not that far from Paignton. But what has that got to do with drinking water supply? Has some ancient cast iron water pipe been dug into the channel of the river? Has the pipe been laid over the hills, with the water driven by some huge pump?

PS 2: a couple of days later, the yellowhammer puzzled about below has now been run down to reference 4, four years ago now. The reason it took so long to find it is that at reference 4 the talk is of yellow hammers, and presumably the relevant search feature is fussy about plurals - as well as splitting the word in two, which I had thought of. The route to finding went through my contemporaneous notes (the sort of notes which policemen are supposed to make in their note books) in Microsoft's OneNote, rather than through the Word blog archive. I learn that I have tweeted whinchats before. And all of which reminds me that we have been going to Holne for at least four years now.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/tweeting.html. Last October. I thought we got a yellowhammer on one occasion, but cannot presently trace it.

Reference 2: https://adriancolston.wordpress.com/tag/holne-moor/.

Reference 3: https://adriancolston.wordpress.com/.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/05/tweets.html.