Perhaps a hum-drum offering but a few days ago Barbara Allan, the Blitz Co-ordinator, and I were in a Jerra hide when a dark raptor with wings motionless swept over in a rapid down-wind glide, allowing only a quick snap or two.
We guessed it was probably a Little Eagle. Closer example showed it was a Whistling Kite. No real trickery, but the attached outline darkens out any plumage detail and is from an uninformative angle.
However, Kym Bradley and Chris S got it. About the only clues were the slightly bowed wings and slender hooked bill - no fingered wingtips or longish pale tail. The point is: in practice so many views give only an uninformative angle, particularly still photos. In Stephen Debus’s excellent talk last night, I thought a slightly disappointing point was that the images shown were TOO informative, indicating the points that enable rather than obscure identification - all the sparrowhawks had distinct square or notched tails, and the goshawks rounded ones. It is not always that simple. A useful point was the changing geometry according to the flight attitude - including that tricky down-wind glide, when several species can look quite similar.
By contrast here is your Whistling Kite with a bit more plumage detail. If you want to know what it was carrying, it was a bundle of entrails, perhaps from a road kill. To eat them it sat in one of those FSP radiatas, that over the years have been used more by the resident Little Eagles but seem to have been taken over by the kites. Something of a mystery because the LEs are nesting nearby in the vicinity of last year’s nest although the location of their preferred hunting grounds this year is not at all clear.
