Diary, birds and email

[wellinghall]

Today I'm off to Glasgow; 3pm flight, which means the taxi is coming at 1.30. Back on Tuesday; I land at 7pm, so should be back home by 8. I've then got an appointment on Wednesday evening; so don't expect posts or responses before Thursday.

There are some nice birds of prey here:
http://www.photo.net/bboard/nw-fetch-msg?msg_id=00IgVZ&unified_p=1

I've somehow b*ggered up my Mozilla Thunderbird, to the extent that (a) I've lost all my old emails, (b) lost all my old email addresses, and (c) can't send or receive new emails. Actually, it's not quite that bad; I was nearly up to date with responding to emails; I do have key addresses stored in my Psion; and I can still access current emails through webmail. However, I wondered if anyone here might be able to give me some tech support next Thursday / Friday / weekend? If so, perhaps you could email me on
andrew at hrothgar dot force9 dot co dot uk
and I can then ring / email you back.

Comments

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

Aw shucks.

Didn't we not so long ago have a conversation about *backing up one's data*!

Anyway sorry to hear you have been having problems. (Note to self, about time to back up my own data again methinks).

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, regular back-up schedules, whatever happend to those? ;-)

I remember my first job - every Friday afternoon, we got out our 5.25" floppy disks and backed up our hard drives!

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

Thanks from Malaheed and me for the birds of prey link. Red kite count from yesterday's trip along the M40 to Oxford: 17.

[romancinger.livejournal.com]

How do you tell they're red kites? I can recognise a kestrel at some distance, and probably a buzzard, but I've never seen a kite to my knowledge. Although I did spot a couple of birds of prey on a recent train trip to Oxford, and couldn't work out what they were likely to be.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

Have a look at malaheed's user icon!

Red kites are slightly larger than buzzards (longer, more pointed wings) have forked tails which they swivel a lot, rather like swallows. Once you know it's a kite, their flight behaviour is very distinctive even when they're hardly more than a dot in the sky. Where buzzards mostly seem to circle on upstreams, kites seem to slide along the air and often fly lower. About 10 years ago they were reintroduced to the Chilterns near the M40 motorway cut (the one from the titles of the Vicar of Dibley), and they've done very well, spreading out quite a distance from there. If your birds were big, fairly low and anywhere between Stokenchurch and Oxford it was almost certainly red kites.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Ooh, lucky you; they never quite seem to make it up to our end of the Chilterns. We do get kestrels, buzzards and sparrowhawks, but that's all we've seen (oh, and heard a few owls); we've had sparrowhawk leavings in our garden a few times.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

Malaheed saw one the first time he drove back from visiting me in Oxford, and said he nearly drove off the road with excitement and disbelief. We hadn't yet heard of the reintroduction programme (indeed I hadn't heard of red kites at all!) so as far as he knew there weren't any left in England, just in Wales. Now they are spreading in Yorkshire and the Northeast as well, from reintroduced Welsh and Spanish birds. You can pretty much guarantee seeing at least half a dozen between junctions 4 and 8 on the M40 if the weather isn't vile.

In Dunharrow we only get buzzards (circling high during the summer) and sparrowhawks. There are also kestrels but we haven't seen any. The Headstone Manor moat is supposed to have kingfishers, for that matter, but all we've seen is moorhens and shopping trolleys.