Spookdaddy
Cuckoo
- Joined
- May 24, 2006
- Messages
- 8,009
- Location
- Midwich
I think this counts as exotic.
Related on the Strange Bird Behaviour (General; Miscellaneous) thread, by me, some years ago:
Related on the Strange Bird Behaviour (General; Miscellaneous) thread, by me, some years ago:
...I was walking to work early one morning, my mind still a bit half-asleep and focussed on nothing much at all, when I got this odd and quite strong sense of unease. There was nothing obvious to explain the feeling; it was a sunny morning I was enjoying the job I was involved in at the time and I was, generally speaking, relatively happy with my lot. All in all there seemed to be nothing to account for the edginess I had started to feel. Then I noticed that the birds were acting very oddly. They were in a kind frenzy - skittering around at pavement level, virtually flying into each other in apparent panic - and the woods which line the uphill side of the road were unusually noisy with alarm calls.
I had once or twice seen a sparrowhawk in the area, but the level of activity seemed over the top even for such an efficient predator - it was almost as if the birds were trying to bury themselves under the ground in order to get away from whatever it was they feared and their panic seemed so all consuming that they didn't appear to even register my presence. In fact, they were flying so close to me that I reckon I could have reached out and plucked them from the air.
Once I'd become conscious of the unusual activity around me I actually stopped walking - initially because I thought I might get a glimpse of the sparrowhawk I mentioned. And then something made crane back and look directly above me and I experienced one of those, to my mind, truly Fortean moments when you register that you're seeing something that really shouldn't be there, before you've even registered what it actually is that really shouldn't be there in the first place.
What I saw circling lazily above me and riding the thermals as if it owned the bloody place was only, I kid you not, a bloody enormous vulture. This is in NW Derbyshire, mind you.
I suspect what it was the Staffordshire escapee, Bones (story here).
Now, obviously a vulture would constitute no particular threat to bird life, but I can't help thinking that all the birds around me that morning saw and reacted to was a huge and unfamiliar raptor circling their general vicinity, and reacted accordingly by going into conniptions...