Late Wheatear and Five Raptors

I've  just noticed that my last post was numbered 333, half the number of the beast according to Revelation! --- so I'd better move on quickly.

I managed an early morning ride over the plains this morning before I resumed my wrestling with the garden. A single female wheatear was an unexpected sight so late in the Spring; she remained
completely stationary in a ploughed field throughout the five minutes or so that I watched her before I moved on to view an equally statuesque stone curlew in an adjacent field.

Four black kites were taking advantage of a recently mowed hay field to prospect for their breakfast and a male hen harrier made his familiar slow and stately progress in a different area for the same purpose. Our usual commonest raptors, buzzard and kestrel were strangely absent until later in the ride and not until I'd clocked a female sparrowhawk which was hunting near the bio farm.

Cacophony is not really an appropriate term for the throbbing notes of nightingales but so many were singing this morning, and often in close proximity to each other, that it was difficult at times to pick up other calls. Nevertheless, ' a slow and stopping' ( as Philip Larkin would have termed it) two hour ride around the plains turned up forty three species including tree pipit but still no sign of any shrikes.