The Life of Buzzards

Yes, I’ve really been reading this one book for the past ten days. Slow going because I’ve been fairly busy so only had time to sit down and read briefly each day, and also because it was rather boring. Reading it reminded me of the Schaller book about lions. Like that one, this account is very factual- all kinds of data and charts. Numbers. The main focus is population fluctuations, how they are tied to prey numbers, specifically when rabbits had a huge dieoff due to myxomatosis. The studies took place in Great Britian. Which threw me off for a great while- I’ve seen this book on the shelf at my library over the past few visits, and was curious because I thought it was about turkey buzzards, which are a common vulture here where I live. I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to learn something about these rather despised birds, that you often see feeding on roadkill. But no, it’s about a kind of open-country generalist hawk that lives in Britian, comparable to the red-tailed hawk here. So I learned about a different kind of bird.

A few things did surprise me- I didn’t know that buzzards will eat worms, beetles and frogs. In fact, when other prey are scarce they spend hours ‘grubbing’ in fields for invertebrates, sometimes in large groups (up to thirty birds together!) That when you see them soaring in circles way up high, they’re not usually hunting for prey (like a vulture would do) but making a territorial display so other hawks know the area is taken (hunting is done from lookout perches closer to the ground). One buzzard eats about 157 rabbits per year, or 1,960 voles! Here’s a most curious tidbit: this stuff called ‘star jelly‘ which I’d never heard of, but apparently people find around the woods and fields in that part of the world, is according to this author, the oviducts of frogs that buzzards removed and discarded before eating.

At the end, I was just going to scan the appendices, which include even more charts of data, but found myself reading the few pages of actual logs, notes of real-time observations in the field. Those four pages were the most engaging of the entire book, for me. It seems this one was just not my style.

Borrowed from the public library.