To launch this new blog I've chosen the smallest identifiable feather I've yet come across since I started this mad habit of looking for, identifying, collecting and selling feathers. I found this specimen this in the same way as I usually do: scanning the ground for fresh moult feathers whilst out and about on the twice daily walks around the local area with Molly our English Springer Spaniel.
This diminutive tail feather (just 55 mm long) was located along a path that runs through some scrubby woodland by the M6 before opening out into fresh air and running a further couple of hundred yards alongside a meadow filled with many small hawthorns and the like and used occasionally as a horse paddock. It was just a little way inside the cover of the woods...
The feather is one of the more distinctive of the song bird feathers with its slim profile and light ochre coloured tip and in this country it really can't be confused with much else. It is the feather second or third from last on the left of the tail depending upon maturity - the adult outside feather having a much larger diagonal area of light ochre extending from the tip to half way up. All the middle tail feathers are just a plain very dark slate grey - if I'd found one of those then I would have been none the wiser as many small birds have such indistinctive tail feathers and it could have been taken for a number of them - but of course now, any feathers of the same size and the same dark grey found round these parts will be more easily attributed to this particular pipit.
Meadow pipits are not that common in Warwickshire and I've certainly never seen one, nevertheless this is proof positive that they live around the local area. I'll keep an eye out for them in the next few weeks. Interestingly the same meadow has a large old oak slap in the middle of it and this tree is used by one of the the local buzzards as a perch. I have never seen the bird in the meadow but a few of her feathers are usually there below the oak as evidence of her presence. These are mostly breast and flank but I have found three secondaries in the last few weeks, one of which had been there some time and had been trodden into the mud by the horses.
This diminutive tail feather (just 55 mm long) was located along a path that runs through some scrubby woodland by the M6 before opening out into fresh air and running a further couple of hundred yards alongside a meadow filled with many small hawthorns and the like and used occasionally as a horse paddock. It was just a little way inside the cover of the woods...
The feather is one of the more distinctive of the song bird feathers with its slim profile and light ochre coloured tip and in this country it really can't be confused with much else. It is the feather second or third from last on the left of the tail depending upon maturity - the adult outside feather having a much larger diagonal area of light ochre extending from the tip to half way up. All the middle tail feathers are just a plain very dark slate grey - if I'd found one of those then I would have been none the wiser as many small birds have such indistinctive tail feathers and it could have been taken for a number of them - but of course now, any feathers of the same size and the same dark grey found round these parts will be more easily attributed to this particular pipit.
Meadow pipits are not that common in Warwickshire and I've certainly never seen one, nevertheless this is proof positive that they live around the local area. I'll keep an eye out for them in the next few weeks. Interestingly the same meadow has a large old oak slap in the middle of it and this tree is used by one of the the local buzzards as a perch. I have never seen the bird in the meadow but a few of her feathers are usually there below the oak as evidence of her presence. These are mostly breast and flank but I have found three secondaries in the last few weeks, one of which had been there some time and had been trodden into the mud by the horses.
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