Look To The Heavens

It's that time of year again, and the frogs have arrived in droves down at the wildlife pond. The **** heron thinks it has died and gone to heaven; so many delicious frogs to eat that it doesn't know which one to go for first. Last year I was able to keep him at bay for a few days by fixing some strips of kitchen foil to a cane so that they fluttered in the breeze, but this year he was braver. We tried to train Ted, our young Labrador, to chase it off but it still got far more frogs than we would of liked. If a heron catches a female frog it has to disembowel it or the spawn jelly, which swells on contact with water, would swell up inside the heron and give it a nasty tummy ache! We only found one or two discarded females and no odd bits, so did our heron deliberately pick out the much smaller males? It was always the same heron, it had a few feathers missing from its right wing giving it a very distinctive look as it circled above us while we waved our arms and called it names. Despite all this we still got a huge amount of spawn and the pond is now full of tadpoles.
Because of this unwanted visitor we have found our eyes drawn to the pond and the sky around it. This has been rewarding as we have spotted a pair of Red Kites flying over. Since the reintroduction programme started around Stokenchurch and the M4 we have seen the odd Red Kite flying over but not such a good view as we had last week. Although the male was quite high, the much larger female was at treetop height and we got a lovely view of her forked tail and chestnut markings. She seemed to be quartering the ground looking for food and we were enjoying the site when a very heavy shower came and drove us indoors. Red Kites eat carrion, or 'dead stuff' as our son used to say. They will carry off road kills and any other carcasses they can find. In Tudor times they would feed on rubbish in all the big cities, so they are not too fussy! A couple of days later I saw a female flying over Dunny Lane, so keep your eyes open! If they are very high and gliding the forked tail is not quite so obvious but it has very distinctive white patches under its wings and as soon as it manoeuvres or starts hunting the forked tail is unmissable. It's a true master of the air, so graceful and agile. It is bigger than a buzzard and its wings are slightly bowed and tail twisted where a buzzard's wings are usually turned up.
Summer must be on its way, we heard the Chiffchaff for the first time today (April 8th). Wendy Bathurst