Tweetholne

That is to say the tweets accrued during a week staying near Holne, on the eastern edge of Dartmoor, with the last such report to be found at reference 1.

On and around the bird feeders, plenty of chaffinches and great tits. One or two nuthatches. One or two sparrows - quite rare in our own garden. Maybe the odd blue tit and one coal tit.

Contrariwise, a regular flock of sparrows in a garden hedge in the St. Thomas area of Exeter. It probably helped that the feeders were close to the hedge, not requiring a dangerous trip out in the open.

Three silver grey ducks with brown heads on the Dart at Hembury, not your regular ducks of park and pond at all. But, as ever, RSPB site not very helpful. So not a tweet at all.

One green woodpecker sitting with his back to me on a gorse bush on Holne Moor. Two white flashes in the tail when sitting, and a larger flash of green when he took off. Some skylarks. The only other small birds positively identified out in the country were robins, this despite plenty of bird song.

One small flock of male pheasants, on the road. Regular pheasants, not the black pheasant of the last visit, now missing.

Two distinct owl noises one night, either two different sorts of owl or two different sorts of activity. Probably not the owl featured in yesterday's Bing. In any event, not a tweet.

Otherwise, just two probable raptors, flying over the tall trees of Hembury Woods. Long wings with pointed tips, an occasional croak, somewhere between the croak of a crow and the quack of a duck. About the size of a buzzard. One other possible raptor in the form of a large brown bird sitting in a tree, but which flew off before we could get close.

However, there was some compensation on the way home when we tweeted a kite over the M3, made conspicuous by its forked tail, not present on other raptors that I know of. For the only other time that I have seen such a thing, see reference 2.

There were also a couple of small mumerations, that is to say small clouds of starlings flying in formation, somewhere on Salisbury Plain.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/tweets.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/big-tweet.html.