It is not just the range of wildlife that is interesting, quite often it is a behaviour exhibited by an otherwise common species.

On Thursday I was briefly in the Woodland hide where there were at least 15 brambling and 14 reed bunting feeding, but the thing that caught my eye was a grey squirrel.

There were several squirrels about, but one was running passed the hide carrying something large in its mouth. I did not immediately see what it was carrying before it had gone by. However it came back along the same route and this time I could see it was carrying a baby squirrel. It later came back with a third, evidently this squirrel was moving its young family to a new home. Whilst this may not be an unusual behaviour it was one I had never seen before.

Earlier in the week I was sent a picture by a regular visitor Lynda Miller that illustrated another behaviour that I was unaware of.

I shows a kingfisher clearly collecting beakfuls of reedmace seeds, Lynn told me the bird then flew off carrying the seeds. The only reason that I can thing of for doing this is to line a nest, however as far as I was aware or can find out from the literature, the most they are recorded as doing is “lining the nest with fish bones added during incubation”. So this might be an original observation.

Over the years there have been a number of other interesting observations made from the hides at Blashford. These include mallard killing and eating juvenile sand martin when they fell into the water, this was seen ten years or so ago by many people. Subsequently this behaviour has appeared in the scientific literature as an “original observation” made in Eastern Europe.

Hides can offer the chance to see unusual things even when all the wildlife present is not unusual, you never know what might happen.