Wealden Times | WT244 | September 2022 | Winter Interiors Supplement inside

Garden
peaceful existence until the following spring.
And with noise in mind, we arrived at the
house to the sound of a bird shrieking from
the neighbour’s garden, so it was over the fence
to find out what it was only to find a juvenile
woodpecker stuck deep in a thicket. It was
making a piercing distress signal because it had
been pursued into its thicket prison by some sort
of raptor that was trying and failing to get him
out. A flurry of big black wings and his potential
attacker left the scene and the woodpecker was
rescued to live another day. But the interesting
thing was that we had no idea what sort of bird
the woodpecker was about to fall victim to until
the following day when, in the late afternoon, we
saw him out hunting again – this time pursuing a
blackbird through a birch thicket. He was flying
low and we saw him long enough to identify him
as a Northern Hawk Owl (Surnia ulula); not
something you see very often. So they are neither
nocturnal nor crespular (hunting in the twilight)
but are active in the day and they tend to remain
within their breeding territory, which we were
obviously in. We were
surrounded by boreal
forest, mixed coniferous
and deciduous trees,
perfect for this breed.
These owls behave like
a hawk but look like
an owl, with a rounded
body but with pointed
wings like a falcon. To
add to the picture their
backs are mostly black,
which was so distinctive
when it wheeled away on
our arrival, and they have a
whitish breast marked with dark
horizontal stripes. A fabulous creature.
The tracks that you can follow for miles
are lined with all manner of plants, so you
need to take your time peering to left and right.
Free sustenance is provided by the wild raspberries
on the way. It was too early to see many butterflies
but there were one or two lovely fritillaries
Northern Hawk Owl (Surnia ulula)
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