Hungry rook

 Fields here have been blanketed with snow, and the ground frozen rock-hard, for four days now, so these are tough times for birds like rooks, that normally feed on soil invertebrates. This one has been visiting the garden every day, using that pick-axe beak to hack away at balls of dough, fat and cheese. It's very cautious in this confined space, surrounded by hedges and trees, which isn't perhaps surprising for a bird that normally feeds in wide open spaces with a clear field of view. It never hangs around for very long.

When sunlight glances off those black feathers they have a lovely green iridescence.

A rook, with its coat of many colours

 I'd always thought of rooks as birds with uniform black plumage, until this one landed in a tree outside my window and the early morning sun highlighted the iridescence in its feathers, particularly around its head. Look closely and you can see a blue, purple and green lustre, depending on the angle of the light.

Local patch lockdown 2: more birds

The end of another week of coronavirus lockdown early morning exercise walks, and still seeing new birds very close to home.

The best sighting was this pair of partridges - red-listed birds. They look like they are nesting in the hedge on the edge of a pasture (that was part of an opencast coal mine 25 years ago)

This pair of magpies are always in a pasture on part of a small holding

Surprised to see this reed bunting in a roadside hedge. It was about a mile from a large pond and reed bed, created as mitigation for the coal mining, where it might be nesting.

There are small rookeries nearby, so they are always searching for small soil animals in the pastures

Carrion crow repairing an old nest in an ash tree

Greeted every morning by the song of chaffinches

Coal tits are always in the trees close to small larch and pine plantations, which were established after opencast coal mining ended here. 

Curlew in a sheep pasture. Listening to their call is a lovely way to begin the day.

Lapwing aerial courtship displays are over now. Most will have nests with eggs.

Soon after sunrise on sunny mornings the air is always full of the song of skylarks, but they also sing on the ground.

Pied wagtail on a farmyard muck heap - a profitable feeding site for a bird that hunts flies

The glorious sound of a song thrush

And the song of a wren - a lot of noise for such a small bird 

Regurgitated beetles and cherry stones

We found this regurgitated pellet, full of cherry stones, near some wild cherry trees in a field beside the river Tees near Egglestone, at the weekend. I'm pretty sure it was produced by a rook, as there is quite a large rookery nearby and I've often seen them feeding in this field.

Regurgitated pellets of indigestible food held in the gizzard are usually associated with raptors and owls but many other birds produce them, including rooks, crows, magpies, gulls, herons and even oystercatchers, which expel pellets of sand grains swallowed with their food onto the seashore.

When I took this pellet home and soaked it in soapy water it fell apart almost immediately, revealing eleven cherry stones, plus ....



..... the remains of at least ten ground beetles. 

Strangely, each of the beetle heads was perfectly intact and snipped off from the rest of the body at exactly the same point. A ground beetle's jaws are quite powerful and I imagine that they would grip the bird's throat as it tried to swallow its prey, so I wonder whether this rook had leaned to detach the heads and incapacitate its victim before swallowing it.

The other debris included fragments of wing case, plus ...

..... lots of legs.

So how did the bird come to be eating cherries and beetles in the same meal? It might be because the ground under the trees was covered in rotting cherries, which might have attracted soft bodied invertebrates like slugs and worms, which might in turn have proved a fatal attraction for the beetles.