With only its ear tufts to grow this young Long Eared Owl looks very much like an adult. By now it is well able to catch prey for itself and will soon be driven away from the nesting area and will have to look for a wood of its own. There will be many more doing the same in the next few months as they have had an exceptional breeding season which is good news for us as it is always a good day when you find a roosting Long Eared Owl.

Whilst watching Barn Owls a few nights ago at dusk I found a field of maize that was being used as a roosting place for five hundred plus Swallows. It is a long time since I watched Swallows roosting but it is still an exciting sight and to think that this field is just one staging post for their migration to South Africa. Forty years ago this month I was part of a group that caught and ringed more than five thousand Swallows in the reed beds near Wigan. We had many of those birds recovered in South Africa. The sound of Swallows gathering at dusk always brings back good memories of those nights at Wigan. The only difference being that on those occasions there were more than ten thousand birds present each night!

In the garden there are still family parties of Goldfinches coming to feed. Some of the young have only just fledged the nest.

Here is a photo of the young Greater Spotted Woodpecker that visits our garden on its own, now that it has been abandoned by the adults.During the week the Collared Dove record has gone up to twenty feeding together. What is it going to finish at?

In a moorland plantation I heard my only young Sparrowhawks this year begging for food. I understand they are down in number this year and this is the first year for decades that I have failed to find a nest. Three young Dabchicks were a late brood to find especially as this pair had their first nest in April and have had a very successful breeding season despite severe disturbance from youths swimming in their pool in the hot weather on May and June.

On Hopwood a Green Woodpecker called during the week and yet again a year goes by without any proof of their breeding. It was good to hear Goldcrest in the pines but are they local breeding birds or early migrants from Scandinavia? The Sand Martins and Swallows are still producing young with most having had second broods despite the recent poor weather.

This week I have had several sessions on the local Sand Martins and todays photo shows four young crammed into the entrance of their nesting hole. They have had an incredible breeding season with twenty five/thirty pairs fledging two broods each. It all adds up to more than two hundred young fledged from this one bank on the local golf course – a very pleasing result especially as the whole colony was predated by a stoat two years ago and I thought they would never return to breed again.

In the garden a male Reed Bunting is now feeding regularly along with ten Greenfinches and twelve Collared Doves.

The breeding season is now coming to an end and for most species it has produced record results. The young Barn Owls I was filming last week are now flying around and need some good weather to master the art of catching voles and mice.

The last challenge of the breeding season remains the Hobby so for another week the search continues.

It is always good to film Barn Owls but this week’s photo has come from a special pair. Thirty eight years ago I sat in the same barn and filmed my first ever nocturnal birds – Barn Owls. So here I was again, much older and wiser than last time but still with an exciting challenge ahead. The sad fact is that in the intervening years the Barn Owls have only bred once, such is the decline of the local Barn Owl population. THree young are about to fledge and with the motorways and busy roads nearby their life expectancy may only be a couple of years- if they are lucky. I wish them well.

A visit to the Roaches on the North Staffordshire moors only produced Kestrels and Buzzards, the Hobby proving yet again to be elusive. There was ,however, a magnificent spread of Bog Asphodel, one of the special plants of the high Pennines.

In the garden there have been eleven Collared Doves and family parties of Jays, Goldfinches and BUllfinches.

A quick trip to Finland during the week and two days spent filming the eyrie of a pair of Ospreys. On the first day I spent eleven hours in a hide on scaffolding just above the height of the eyrie and twenty meters away. It was a magical experience during which there were nine visits to the eyrie by the male with fish. The female would then feed the three young on the captured prey for up to ten minutes. She was extremely vocal and would call to the male to bring more prey every time he came within her sight. The added bonus to the day was filming a pair of Red Backed Shrikes that had young in a nest in a pine tree only fifteen feet from the Osprey tree. During my filming of the Ospreys Honey Buzzard, Crane, Whimbrel, Greenshank and Golden Plover were all seen from the Osprey tower. On my second day in the hide I spent ten hours watching the eyrie and there were only two feeds compared to the nine the day before. It just shows that in the bird world there are no repeat performances – no two days are the same.

When I arrived in Helsinki airport on the way home I had six hours to wait for the Manchester flight. The temperature outside was 34°C, the highest ever recorded in Finland in the last fifty years! I went for a very hot walk around the airport gardens. Fieldfares had young in a pine tree and a Wheatear was feeding in a gravel area but most surprisingly was the finding of a dead Willow Warbler and a dead Whitethroat only three feet apart in the shade of an airport car park. As Helsinki has had a week of temperatures of over 30°C ,had they died of heat exhaustion?

Here is a photo of a Little Owl that is now able to fly but is still using the nest hole in the wall as a safe diurnal rest place. Hole in the walls are not only useful to humans but nobody knows how many pairs of Little Owls use them as nest sites in Britain. There has never been a national survey on this and probably never will be in view of the number of walls in such places as the Yorkshire Dales. What is also not generally realised is that far from being nocturnal most of these wall nesting Pennine Little Owls feed their young actively during the day. In the last week alone I have filmed a pair bringing caterpillars to their young all day and seen another male bringing a field mouse to its young at 9.30am.

Whilst walking the forest I have again made contact with fully fledged young Long Eared Owls that only had their ear tufts to grow before becoming adults. Sparrow Hawks have been more elusive and to date I have not located any active nests, so time is running out.

On the local golf course Buzzards are present and sadly once again are not accompanied by any young. The sandy bank of the stream, that I dug vertical in March, is now occupied by a thriving colony of Sand Martins so it just shows that you can do something to help wildlife