At 10am on 11 January 2013 Stephen Kemp from Orkney Builders was admiring the view from his office window when all hell broke loose and a male Peregrine snatched a gull out of the sky, the Peregrine landed on the bird and proceeded to pluck the gull. The two images below were taken with Stephen's iphone... It must have been close.
"He sat there for around half an hour eating quite relaxed". You can see the feathers at the spot where he initially landed the gull and killed it. Stephen was intrigued at how he confidently then dragged the dead gull to the cover of the fence to enable him to eat and have ‘rear cover’ from interested crows so that he was only watching 180deg – pretty switched on!
A fantastic sighting of one of four falcon species we have on Orkney currently, three of these (Peregrine, Kestrel & Merlin) are regular breeders and the other (Gyr Falcon) is a rare winter visitor from Greenland.
Gyr Falcon image was taken by Morris Rendall and the Peregrine, Kestrel & Merlin were RSPB images.