Friends and Relations?

I'm not too sure what was going on here.  Every now and again the female Marsh Harrier would fly over a patch of reeds  and the male would fly up to meet her, but would promptly be ignored, and would retire disgruntled.  At first, I thought that one of the birds might have been a juvenile and was still begging for food, but they are both clearly mature birds so it can't have been that.  

It's not the right time of year for their courtship behaviours.  So I'm guessing that either the male was eating something and wanted to warn the female off, or they were squabbling over the same bit of the marsh.  Who knows?

Marsh Harriers were historically native to the Somerset Levels, but by the early 1800s they had become extinct in all of Great Britain.  Occasional Marsh Harriers from the Continent would take up residence in the East of England but just 50 years ago they were our rarest breeding bird.  

Jump forward to today and the most recent estimate (published in the journal British Birds in February 2020) puts the figure at between 590 and 695 pairs.  The vast majority of those are in the East and South East, but there is healthy population at the Avalon Marshes in Somerset where your chances of seeing them on a visit is pretty good.

The bird that I had hoped to see, a bearded tit, didn't turn up.  It sounds as though the few occurrences that people have recorded recently are of just one or two birds, which would suggest that their flocking behaviour has finished now, so I've probably missed my chance to see them this year. Being under the weather in September/October wasn't such good timing in that respect.  Still, hopefully there's always next year :-)