The birds

It seems that my prediction of a locally mild winter has been fairly accurate so far: we have had a few nights with frost, but rarely anything below -2. One night delivered a couple of centimetres of snow, but it lasted barely a few hours. We have, however, had fairly unrelenting rain with dark skies and terrible light.

Buzzards are a fairly common sight in the area, and we often have a couple flying directly over the house as they circle looking for prey. A pair decided to survey the local rookery, so I tried to get a few shots. As soon as you point anything at them, they make a dash for cover, and this is the shot I got as they flew round the other side of my house:

Buzzard

The sky is the colour that I have become familiar with over the last 40 days or so.

When we arrived back from shopping today, I noticed a Song Thrush lying beside our front doorstep. It seemed to be in some distress, but it didn't move as I rattled off a few shots. After I put the camera down, I approached it to see if it had any injuries, but it flew off, apparently in good order. On close examination of the photographs, however, I see that there are injuries to each side of the head, as shown in the following shot:

Injured Song Thrush

Those injuries are indicative of a predator of some kind, but I don't think that our local cat has a mouth large enough for that.

Another mystery.

Interestingly enough, this is a new addition to my Species List.