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My Birding Blog

Have you ever been somewhere that has totally surprised you?
I have!

I work for a company based just outside Attleborough. The site is massive and the company is always very busy with forklifts constantly on the move, lorries everywhere and machinery running all the while inside and out.
Regardless of the activity and noise in the yard and associated buildings, the site is a wildlife haven.

Laurel hedges in the car park are perfect for small birds and are alive on a daily basis with numerous House Sparrows and Dunnocks, plus other species too.

There are many old farm buildings on the site too which are visited every year by nesting Swallows and House Martins. Swifts and swallows are present in good numbers but House Martins are by far the largest of the flocks with usually between fifty and a hundred in the air, sometimes more, at any one time over the site.
A gap in the roof tiles provided a nesting site for a Pied Wagtail last year as well.

Along part of the north perimeter of the site is a row of mixed trees, primarily Oaks. These have produced many Tit species including Blue, Great and Long Tailed, plus Chaffinches, Greenfinches and Goldfinches.
The most spectacular of visitors to these trees however are the Woodpeckers. I have seen Great Spotted and heard Green Woodpeckers along there. 
A little Owl can sometimes be seen along there too.

One day inside the main warehouse a mysterious bird flew in and landed on a support beam. I wasn’t there when it flew in and so when I got back my colleagues asked me if what had flown in was a pigeon or a dove or something else. It was a mystery to them! I had great pleasure in telling them it was a Sparrowhawk. Beautiful bird and as luck would have it, the order I was working on required me to venture onto one of the top shelves to get some products down. Whilst I was up there I came face to face with the Sparrowhawk which had landed opposite me on another beam. It sat there staring at me with beautiful orange eyes.
For a brief moment I was looking into the eyes of a Sparrowhawk and it was looking into the eyes of a human. It’s an experience I wont forget!  

At the back of the site, works land turns to private land, and lots of it!
In the winter, this land is frequented by a lot of Fieldfares and Redwings. They can often be seen flying around.  I don’t see much of that area and intend in the future to study it more out of work time. Luckily, a public footpath runs along the bottom of it which also features a small stream known for Otters and the increasingly rare Water Vole and even a Little Egret has been seen there.

Adaptability is the key word when talking about birds on our site. While the Swallows and Martins take advantage of their usual types of nesting places, other species around the site have to adapt to their surroundings and use what is available to them. As a result we’ve had a Great Tit nesting inside a metal tube holding up a floodlight, and that nest has been successful for the past three years.
The second nest that is always successful but also the weirdest is that of the Jackdaw.
 Many years ago they built a nest in the top half of our crane. The crane moves up and down on hydraulics and moves around the site regularly and yet the Jackdaws always find the nest and the young are never affected by the hydraulic movement of it. They also nest in the top half of a radio transmitter mast on the side of the warehouse.
Pigeons and Doves nest around the site too but always seem to nest in the most inconvenient places.

Besides my best experience of the Sparrowhawk, I have had two other very memorable moments. The first being the time when I saw a Buzzard fly overhead. What’s so special about that I hear you say. Well, when the first flew out of view another two went over. Then another three!  I can never remember how many in total went over but it was between five and eight. I have never seen anything like that before or since.
The other memorable moment was also Bird of Prey related.
I was at the far east end of the site filling our incinerator when I spotted an extremely large Bird of Prey flying low overheard. ‘That’s got a forked tail’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s a Red Kite!’
In case it disappeared quickly I got my mobile out and filmed it and then went back to the warehouse to tell my boss who happens to be an expert birdwatcher and he was annoyed as he couldn’t come and look due to doing some work for the MD. However, the MD spotted the Red Kite on one of his surveillance cameras and was very quickly onto the phone to my boss to tell him to go out and look.
In the end the Kite stayed overheard for nearly an hour, very low, circling round and round looking for food.

During migration periods the skies above the site can really hold some gems. Only the other day we had a Hobby fly over the car park very low and at very high speed.  Various waders fly over en route to their favourite nesting places around Breckland, Starling flocks hundreds in size go over and lots of Finches and Tit flocks also pass overhead.
Cormorants and ducks have flown over to nearby lakes and ponds and even a Heron has been over. Many gulls pass overhead frequently, including Black Headed, Great Black-Backed and Herring Gulls.
Kestrels sometimes hover above the site too but in recent years I have noticed a decline in numbers.

Finally, I’m told by colleagues that Foxes frequent the far east end of the yard although I have never seen them and Rabbits are often seen around the yard too.

The site is surrounded on all four sides by open fields and it’s this and the numerous hedges and trees that I reckon attract so many species of wildlife.

So if you ever thought that noise, machinery, constantly moving vehicles and lots of humans would render a place unfriendly to nature, I say think again!

Links

East Anglia's Children's Hospices

Tony Perkins Butchers

Breckland Astronomical Society

Darren Hampton Guitar Tech

Rebecca's Wishes

Adventure Peaks

Great Ellingham Primary School

Shellrock Group Benefice Site

Artichoke Fashions

Wayland Radio