A Sunny Morning with the Marsh Harriers

16th March 2024

Another beautiful sunny morning at Fowlmere to see how the Marsh Harriers are getting on with their breeding season preparations. As I walked down to the Reedbed Hide I saw and heard my first singing Chiffchaff of the year. It also seems to be a good year for Song Thrushes with three pairs from the south-east corner of the reserve round to the Spring Hide.

I popped into the Spring Hide as I was passing, although I have never seen anything worthy of note from here before, but today a Muntjac was grazing the grass on top of the Kingfisher bank.

And, apparently, if you are a Muntjac and have an itchy eye, the best way to deal with it is to lick it with your tongue!!

Now into the Reedbed Hide and the usual male Reed Bunting was singing from his favourite Elder bush right in front of the hide.

But now on to the Marsh Harriers. Both male and female were present but were not quite as active building the nest as I had expected, and the male flew about five times more than the female. However, I did manage to get some shots of both. Let's start with the female.

I have been watching the harriers at Fowlmere for quite a few years now and have never heard them utter a sound, but the female today was very vocal.

Here she is dropping into the nest.

The male and female are easy to separate from the upper wings due to the barring on the grey of the male. However, separating them from the underwing is more difficult apart from one distinctive feature. Note here that on the female the primaries and secondaries ie the browney-grey trailing half of the wing is plain, whereas the on the male there is a 1cm wide grey trailing edge, see later.

And now for the male.

Normally when the birds are hungry they leave the site and fly out over the neighbouring fields to hunt, and I don't recall seeing them hunting over the reed bed before. However today was different and a couple of times the male flew around with head down looking for prey, but didn't catch anything.

And I mentioned the grey trailing edge of the underwing on the male. Not particularly distinctive but usually discernable (see the following shots).

Breathtaking!!!!!