A plus of lockdown!

Ray’s Nature Musings – part 2

They say every cloud has a silver lining. When Covid 19 hit the country with a vengeance and we were confined to barracks, the lining seemed not quite silver but more of a dirty brown. It quickly became obvious that my wildlife photography trips would be on hold for some time and my camera and I would be restricted to the areas around home.

Here in Kirkheaton, we are blessed with an amazing variety of wild animals. In lockdown, our daily exercise took us through woods and fields which we had not often visited. Kestrels and buzzards hovered overhead, we made new friends, saw roe deer with their prominent white rumps, found stoats playing in an old dry stone wall, little owls sitting on posts and on Ox Field Beck just below the Beaumont Arms, a dipper and a grey wagtail. The weather was amazing in the early part of the year. I spent many an hour sitting next to a pond watching and photographing beautiful dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies.

The tawny owl who fledged from our nest box in the garden two years ago was now back at the box with his new mate. I’ve been feeding this young male owl since shortly after he left the nest and it was fascinating to watch him drop his prey into the box for the sitting female. By March, it was clear that there were chicks at home. The baby tawny owls have this squeaky little call which is unmistakable and both parents were now hunting even in daylight to feed hungry mouths. On 8th May, a fluffy but rather large chick appeared in the entrance to the box and within a few days he or she was joined by another.
Before they can fly, young tawny owls climb out of the nest and find a perch in the tree, a practice known as ‘branching’. Once they leave, they rarely return to the nest so we were now able to watch the parents deliver prey direct to the chick in the tree and then witness the youngsters battle with the task of swallowing it whole or tearing it into more manageable pieces. We felt blessed having the two chicks and could easily find where they were branching so, one afternoon, we were a little nonplussed to find another smaller face peering out of the box. So then there were three!

A week or two later, an associated drama occurred under a full moon. After I had armed myself with patience, cheese, biscuits and hot chocolate I set up my camera on the spot in the garden where I had left dog biscuits and peanuts for a visiting badger. The badger didn’t arrive that night but a little mouse, his eyes shining in the dark, kept me amused for some time by bouncing across the grass and stealing the nuts. Unfortunately for the mouse and unknown to me, I wasn’t the only one watching his antics. On his third or fourth visit, my owl took me completely by surprise when he swooped silently in, talons extended, and took off with the poor little rodent right before my eyes. Life can be so unpredictable, especially if you are a mouse…

I still feed ‘my’ young tawny as I have almost every night for the past two and a bit years. At dusk, he sits in the sycamore or the apple tree waiting for me. I had a stark reminder of the poor mouse one night when I was placing the owl’s supper on the old apple tree stump. in his haste to collect it, he flew in before I had quite removed my hand, leaving me with two neat little puncture marks, 3 cms apart, on my middle finger. Unlike the mouse, I lived to tell the tale.

So, for me, lockdown had its silver lining after all. Being forced to stay home had its upside. I was unable to travel but I was able to witness this extra-special activity right here in my own garden.

Hopefully, 2021 will be a completely different experience for us all and we’ll have the freedom to come and go as we please. However, the 2020 lockdown did remind me of this – that the natural world continues largely unaffected and uninterrupted by our human concerns and that, if we are well enough to make the effort, that nature, unrestricted by government guidelines, is free to enjoy and make us feel better, right here on our doorstep.

Ray Brown, Laneside, Kirkheaton