A ring ouzel! Where are you now, Nick Baker!?!

Today, the skies were blue and so was the sea.  On the way to my office, with a cliff top view, I stopped and gave a lift to a pretty lass who was doing some painting for someone nearby.  On site, I found myself a seat in the sun and watched choughs, wheatears, and then my first ever ring ouzel, for the afternoon.  Not to mention the jackdaws acrobatically flying amongst the rocks, and the gannets diving out to sea, and the raven wafting by, and the kestrel hovering gracefully looking for prey, and the occasional pleasantry with a passer by.

So, it looks like our more mature pair (Mr Redred & Lady Blueorange) are beginning to sit on the nest.  She was spending up to half an hour spells on it while I was watching today.

And our young choughs are surely incubating eggs now, as she is spending more time on the nest than not.  This evening, they both spent time near base together.  He passed her food on a couple of occasions and she spent a little time grooming him, at one point with one of her feet on his back.

To be fair to Nick Baker, his work for the RSPB has been to identify breeding pairs of ring ouzels, and their nest sites.  From his talk on it at the RSPB pre-Christmas South West regional meeting, this seemed to involve him hunkering down for hours trying to work out where the birds were flying to, which he did with some success (http://www.nickbaker.tv/blog/).  All I had to do was sit around in my usual spot and ‘my’ ring ouzel just flew on out from under a nearby rock.  It was pretty unlikely to have been thinking of sticking around, let alone nesting here, as their usual habitat would be uplands, somewhere like Dartmoor.  Still, I was lucky enough to be able to watch it feeding for many minutes during the afternoon, and then again in the early evening.