Saturday, June 14, 2008

Which Eagles?




I am no cameraman. I am no photographer either. However, in my defense, why the expletive don't they make video cameras with viewfinders like they used to? How can you aim, focus and film when you can't see anything in the poxy little screen that the bloody camera is fitted with? So this is a very short video of two birds which spent an hour flying over the house today. Of course the camera battery was not charged so i had to spend 55 minutes of the hour waiting for the bloody thing to charge enough to be able to film and then found that the camera does actually film whilst on charge and that because the crappy little on/off button is so small big fingers were not pushing it far enough. What do they make these camera for, gnomes?! Whatever happened to man sized buttons and switches. Woozle sobs, why does eveything always have to get more difficult? So all the best shots got missed and i also spent a lot of time hunting for the binocs (which i still haven't found) instead of looking at the birds to try and get a positive I.D..
Now we often have golden eagles round here and particularly before a storm as i have probably already mentioned. However the birds i am used to seeing and identifying as golden eagles were i'm sure smaller and certainly made different noises to these two. So now i am not sure if what i have been watching for years and presumptuously not checked up on were in fact not golden eagles at all and these were, or, whether these are some other type of eagle. I have in the past positively identified both the golden eagle and the short-toed eagle and the ubiquitous buzzard but these two seemed too large to be the short-toe and we see buzzards every day so there's no confuson there. The habits were different too particularly their use of the horizontal space and leaps in altitude. The birds i'm used to seeing usually singularly circle high over a relatively small area, these two were zooming from mountain to mountain and back to us and one two occasions flew below us. The oddest thing though was the call. I'm sure i have never hear calls quite like this before but there was a hint of a two tone call which is similar to the usual call. It might just be the time of the month for eagles, who knows, maybe they were simply very big seagulls with feathered wing tips. So this is not something i would ordinarily post but maybe someone out there can identify the birds by their calls (not much chance of identifying them from the video anyway).
Pomon'auk, where are you?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hiya hon, it could be a black kite - they can be seen in Northern Italy - have a look at the wiki page here - the wing shape looks similar - let me know what you think - I couldn't hear the sound very well, so see what you think yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Kite

Pomona
xxx

Woozle said...

Well it's possible because we have quite a few of them only 17 kms away on the rubbish tip. The sound is certainly similar. I found a vid and funny enough they sounded like seagulls!! As you say the wings look right but the only thing is that i would probably have noticed the tail and the two yesterday seemed to have convex tails. I shall be keeping an eye out today, this time only for identification (have found binocs).
Thanks Pomona.xxx