Reproduced below is Michael Walter's latest report. It is slightly shorter than usual as he also wrote about Peter Curd's retirement party in Church Wood, which I have already covered in a previous post:
Occasionally my articles provoke an email or phone call from a reader, and I was intrigued to hear recently from a resident of Hillview Road in Canterbury that he had seen a short-eared owl hunting over Neal’s Place Meadow one afternoon. Formerly agricultural land, the very wet, sloping land is now managed by volunteers as a nature reserve on behalf of Canterbury City Council, the owners. Short-eared owls are extremely scarce breeding birds in Kent, but in winter some cross the North Sea from Scandinavia, and this particular bird was undoubtedly a migrant. As they are characteristic of coastal marsh, a sighting several miles inland is quite unusual. It is therefore not surprising that I don’t have any records of this bird for Blean Woods, though when large swaths were cleared for conifer planting in the 1960s the extensive open ground may well have attracted the occasional wanderer. Tawny owl is the only resident species of owl to be found in Blean Woods, where it can be quite common in some seasons, but over the years I have also seen little and barn owls. Even more exciting was the former breeding of long-eared owls which, as you might expect, are related to short-eared, though in both species the “ears” are really just tufts of feathers that can be raised when alarmed or in display. The long-eared is essentially a woodland bird, but appears to lose out in competition with the supremely well-adapted tawny owl, and is rather more widespread in Ireland, a country that tawny owls have failed to colonise.
Despite their size, jays seem able to melt into the background for much of the year, but in autumn become much more conspicuous as they fly to and from favoured oak trees, ferrying acorns to a “graveyard”, where they dig a small hole, push in the acorn, and then cover it up with a leaf or two. Jays have been shown to have good spatial memories, but much of their buried horde is never recovered – hence the forest of oaks that can spring up in an abandoned field.