We take these birds so much for granted nowadays in Oxfordshire that it perhaps requires an experience such as what unfolded this morning to fully value and admire them. Somewhere in amongst breakfasting and showering I noticed a minor commotion in the perpetually mowed field behind my park home. A Red Kite was being harassed by Magpies, whilst something very clearly dead lay on the ground nearby. Once the raptor was driven off, perhaps surprisingly by its smaller antagonists, I went to look.

The corpse was indeed a Woodpigeon, though it had seemed bigger from further away, largely decapitated and with its belly ripped open. Gruesome stuff, but I didn’t linger for long. By the time the Kite came back I had retrieved my camera. Though I will never make any pretence of being a “photographer”, what ensued made me appreciate one of our most commonplace local, if re-introduced birds almost as much as when I travelled to mid-Wales to encounter the then great scarcity for the first time during the 1980s

Again the Kite took exception to the attentions of Magpies and Jackdaws, abandoning its meal, and so I decided it couldn’t be too bothered and continued with my morning’s ablutions. But when I went out on this day’s wildlife quest the first-named was again in the field and now without corvid interference. So I walked up to my back garden fence and took the pictures that follow. I read recently that blurred foregrounds are considered to be arty amongst my more competitive peers, while the subject itself looks OK to me in these next two studies. Just look at that imposing head and big yellow eye!

By now the remains of the Woodpigeon looked well and truly plucked, feathers littering the ground. Then the Kite suddenly flew off, carrying the partly consumed carrion in its talons, so I went on to my morning’s chosen wildlife task. Perhaps predictably in this current season that was another Orchid, the location for which is generally known in informed county wildlife circles, but which I cannot reveal more widely herein.

The twin-stemmed Lizard Orchid (above), is as far as I am aware the only known current example in Oxfordshire. It has suffered damage this season, possibly from molluscs or else something more substantial stepping upon it. But the good stem of the two was in pristine condition upon my check, offering some attractive pictorial records. I don’t usually do this sort of “what I did today” local stuff in this journal, but I just rather like both sets of images presented in this little post.

Footnote: I have subsequently learned of a further Oxon Lizard Orchid, also at a roadside location in the south of the county.