I saw her take a rabbit up to the nest on one occasion. She placed it carefully in the middle of the nest platform and then let out three or four loud mewing cries. She hung around for about twenty minutes behaving in an uncharacteristically subdued fashion. She was certainly a long way from being her usual agitated, fidgety self. She eventually flew off without having touched the rabbit herself! The right-hand photo shows Brittle just sitting up on the nest a couple of months after the youngsters had disappeared.

These photos are about a year old and show B&B’s nest-site in 2005….one that they built from scratch after the old one was blown down in a storm! The two birds managed to raise two chicks through the summer of 2005, but sadly, both youngsters disappeared during three days that I didn’t observe the nest! Whether it was predators, some sort of an accident or humans from the planet Maggot Slime I can only guess. Whatever the cause, Brittle seemed to take the loss very badly and continued to frequent the nest-site for many weeks after her loss.

In some ways, Brittle reminds me of my wife ….always doing stuff….busy, busy, busy….never a dull moment! The only real difference being that my wife tends more towards being the emotionally strong, resolute type….nor does she seem to spend nearly so much time at the top of very tall trees as she used to!

I said below in the “Brynn” item that I’d eventually get around to introducing another of my Buzzard study characters and so here is “Brittle”. Brittle is Brynn’s devoted mate and a very difficult bird to photograph because she’s such a nervous and timid soul. She’s one of the easiest to identify however, even from a distance….Her plumage is a golden-chestnut colour and she has the most obviously bright yellow cere at the base of her beak of any Buzzard I’ve ever seen. She also has a creamy-white streak on the back of her head which isn’t visible in any of these unfortunately poor quality photographs.

As daft as it sounds, this sort of “sitting around” behaviour was a worry to me. It’s not like her. She’s not at all like other Buzzards in that respect. They love to sit around on fence posts and telegraph poles or up trees as they keep their eyes open for their next meal. Brittle just can’t manage that kind of behaviour for more than five minutes at best and much prefers to go off to look for her lunch in a slightly more pro-active way! She seemed worryingly lacking in any activity at all for at least three months after her babies disappeared. Even Brynn, her archetypal “Noble Savage” partner, seemed concerned about her at times and brought her almost all of her food for weeks because she certainly didn’t appear to eat what little she caught by herself (perhaps though, he too was coping with some sort of loss angst by continuing to feed Brittle after the young had disappeared)! Whatever I might be reading into it, Brittle did seem to be quite “depressed” for quite some time! Interestingly perhaps, She and Brynn, despite still being very much a pair, didn’t raise any young at all in 2006!