Anticipation

 August is an odd month. On the farm it is the culmination of the year's hard work and the harvest is looked towards with more than a little trepidation. Farmers watch each other's movements anxiously all of them willing the crop to ripen in readiness for the fine weather. Until everything aligns they can but wait but the anticipation can be sensed across the golden swathes of countryside.

It is my quietest month with the owls but I know that they are also anticipating busier times ahead in the form of second broods. It is now mid August and I am already being greeted a little more keenly by the male bird that waits high in the ash tree. We have an unspoken agreement, I leave the food here first and whilst I take food over to the dutch barn and the shed where his mate is sitting he helps himself from my first offerings. By the time he has finished I am leaving the farm. As my torch pans over to the farm gate I watch him fold himself neatly as he enters the narrow space into the shed. He now has food for his mate and if I am correct, for their newly hatched owlets. His keenness and new found bravery tell me that he is feeding more than just his female. 

The trail cam showed him extremely attentive around this chosen nest site a couple of weeks back and this was where I found the moult feathers indicating that she was sitting on eggs. What a ingenious plan to moult whilst confined to the nest box; what an admirable piece of multitasking. He has, however, outwitted me as to his roost site. On the odd occasion that I have entered the shed I haven't seen him leave yet he is nowhere to be seen. What the photos have shown me is that he may have a coloured ring in which case he is our male from last year that managed two wives at once. I am happy to think that this bird is still on site and apparently thriving.

The whereabouts of the second pair is still a mystery. I have seen little activity around the chimney but there is an area in the roof of the grain dryer with a broken vent and the opening is peppered with splashy droppings. It would make for a fine owl roost with little disturbance and I intend to do a little surreptitious detective work around that area. After such a poor start to the year two autumn broods would be a delight. The youngsters from June are still visiting. I sometimes hear their insistent hissing as they return in the hope of a free meal yet their visits will soon end. With an imminent second brood the parents will send them away and the screeching we hear after feeding time across the golden crops seem to indicate that this ousting may happen sooner rather than later. Midweek I watched a female hunting before dusk, quartering the ditches and alighting on a branch overlooking the farm's easternmost border. This had to be one of the youngsters and I watched with rapt attention at her focus, her poise and her deadly precision. I hope that her forced eviction into the wider world coincides with the harvest when the voles run scared and she is able to benefit from this bounty. 

As if to make way for the second broods the kestrels have also left the safety of the farm. Their noisy clamouring each morning has lessened until now I only hear the faintest of chattering as I arrive with food. Each evening I shine the torch up onto the air vent of the wheat store. Once there were four stout little bodies huddled together, then three. By last weekend only one remained, probably the last to fledge the nest and as such the last to spread its wings. Last night there were none and I felt sad and proud and relieved that they had made it, all at once. Tonight I walked a different route covering six fields along the riverbank and I was accompanied by a kestrel the whole way home. It was a little reward for my work and such acknowledgement makes my anticipation of new broods ever sweeter.