From the Field

November 2009 - Peregrine v buzzard

Occasionally a disappointing trip in the field can be saved just when you least expect it; this was one such occasion. I had spent a long a fruitless day trying to get some new kingfisher shots and although my subject had the grace to turn up, his generosity didn’t extend to sitting in the right place. Apart from a few average shots of a cygnet, I had photographed nothing and  it was a long and weary trudge back to the cars which we had left on the main road. Because we hadn’t seen each other for a while, Laurence and I had a lot to talk about, so we spent some time leaning  on the motors chewing the fat as the light faded.

While we were talking, Laurence spotted a hawk apparently strike at a bird on the ground, way out in the huge field on the other side of the road; so thinking it might be a sparrowhawk on a pigeon, I dragged the camera (a 40D) back out and set it up so that we could watch what was happening on live-view. This is a handy facility for all sorts of reasons, but I often use it as a kind of telescope come television as when it is set on 10X magnification, two of you can easily watch things happening a long way off with little effort.

The sparrowhawk turned out to be a peregrine and the pigeon a black-headed gull; and we were being treated to a grandstand, if long-range, view of the action. After about two minutes, a buzzard landed about thirty yards away and started edging closer. The peregrine was not at all happy and launched itself on a long circle of the field to build up speed and then raced in like a bullet at the buzzard. What happened next was utterly bizarre and I was lucky enough to get it on film albeit at low quality. Please excuse the images, they were taken at iso settings up to 1600 at 1/160 and f4.5 using a manually focussed 500 mm lens and 1.4x convertor. A very hard combination to keep steady without a remote!

This sequence shows the the buzzard back-flipping in order to slash at the falcon with its talons as it roars overhead. This was not a one off fluke sequence that just makes it look like this is what happened; I photographed three separate attacks in which the buzzard uses the exact same technique. At no time did they actually touch.

In this second one, the falcon attacks from behind, but the buzzard still makes the same move and this time makes a perfect landing on its feet; A full backflip! There are a couple of shots missing at the start because I hadn’t spotted the hawk in time but it still tells the story.

I am continually amazed at the things I see out in the field, and I am just grateful that now I have my cameras, I can relive some of them in a way I never could before, even if some of the images leave a little to be desired quality-wise.