The alarm call of a common buzzard

I drove up to the top of the hills to buy fresh vegetables from the Stancombe Beech farm shop this morning.  I had brought my camera on the off chance that I might see something of interest, and when I left the farmyard, I spotted two skylarks apparently frolicking in mid-air a few feet above the field of spring barley.  I had to find a place to park on the road, and by the time I returned on foot, the birds had gone.

Instead I stood by the Cotswold stone wall at the roadside enjoying the intermittent sun as the clouds passed by and watching the insects on all the wild vegetation on the verge.  As I tried to catch bumble bees in flight (see the 'Extra photos' for an example), my ears caught an unusual sort of screeching sound somewhere in the distance.  I looked around the various fields and my hearing honed in on a copse of tall beech trees a few ghundred yards away.

I wasn't in a hurry, so I decided to walk around the lanes to see if I could locate the sound of what I suspected might be a juvenile raptor.  Once off the road and onto the single track lane the traffic disappeared and I revelled in being in the heart of farming countryside with time on my hands and a camera to play with.

The noise grew louder as I neared the copse and I became surer of my guess as to its origin.  I climbed over the stone wall to walk around the edge of a crop of corn swaying in the strong breeze next to the beech trees behind another wall.  The sound I was chasing stopped and I stood still.  Then it started again closer still and a buzzard appeared just above the tops of the copse. Now there were several calls being made and it was definitely produced by birds.

Two buzzards then started circling above me as the calls from the trees stopped and were replaced by warning calls from the buzzards.  I realised they were circling above me and i was alarming them so i ducked into the copse after taking some pictures of the buzzards in flight.  I could see their faces and their beaks opening as they called.  Once inside the copse I could see the shadows in the canopy of the trees as they flew just above the beech trees.  I am sure their nest was right above me somewhere and probably had juvenile buzzards in them.

As I left the copse they flew away into the distance but it was only a feint to draw me a away from the trees because within a minute they had re-appeared.  I stood to watch them from a slight distance and heard their exchange of calls change to a more normal mewing and realised they weren't frightened anymore.  Then the two buzzards, the parents I assume, flew round on air currents to rise hundreds of feet and then soar high up near to the clouds.  Sometimes they suddenly dived down at high speed, like kestrels do, with their wings pulled right back.  

I felt very lucky to be able to watch them at such close quarters and will make an effort to spend a bit of time hidden away but near to the copse as I know it is where they nest.  There are several buzzards in the valley behind our house, but I have never spotted there nest sites.  Perhaps if I watch these buzzards I can learn a bit more about their behaviour.