Cotswolds. Staring out of the window. Owls at Abberton.

I can only imagine that you are all on tenterhooks, mounted somewhat uncomfortably on the very edges of your seats, and that your breath is baited. Yes, it has been a fair while and you're all eagerly awaiting the next e-turd to slip from my keyboard into the cyber-porcelain bowl of the birdernet. Your wait is over. So, what has been going on recently?

Yeah, this is one of those bullet-point summary posts. Just without the bullet points.

The girl has just had a reading week. I think that's like a post-grad half term break or something, for when they all get tired. Whatever it was, and I'm not entirely certain, I can be fairly sure that it took place the week before the one just gone and that we spent part of it in the Cotswold.

As an area it turned out to be pretty much exactly as expected - pretty, chocolate-box villages of honey coloured stone set in rolling green countryside. I've been through before but have never stopped for fear of meeting people called Hector or Hatty who enjoy playing polo and shooting foxes. I'm willing to accept that people like this exist outside the Cotswolds, it's just that I've always assumed that in the Cotswolds, once you've factored in the huge numbers of tourists, the proportion of those left that are "Hectors" is unpleasantly large. Somewhat unfortunately, this appeared to be the case. Most of the locals we met were massively posh and unwelcoming. Of course, it's possible that this correlation between posh and unwelcoming is nothing more than happenstance - obligatory xkcd - but I'm nowhere near a big enough man to accept that.

Birding wasn't the main aim here, or so I was told, but this was probably a good thing anyway as the areas we explored weren't exactly crawling with birds. Marsh tits and bullfinches were common, and we heard tawny owls and kingfishers. Birding excellence, I tell you. Pro stuff. Birds of prey were very thin on the ground - a few kestrels and buzzards and a single red kite were the only that we had, and all of those bar the red kite were at one site, Dovers Hill.

The pubbing was good. I think we tried every pub in Stow at least twice. I have decided that Donnington Brewery's B.B is one of my new favourite beers. Lagavulin remains the whisky of choice.

Sick day on Wednesday. There was much coughing, but every cloud, and all that. I spent the bits between the illness staring through a scope at the river, cos I'm really cool. A high tide roost of waders on Swanscombe Point comprised 40 redshank and 7 dunlin - good numbers for this stretch of the river. I also had a brent goose, that flew downriver, fairly high, as the tide receeded in the afternoon. Score. The local linnets were around, as were a female peregrine and a coconut. One of these floated up on the tide - I'll leave you to work out which.

Yesterday, I went up to Abberton, for the first time since... well, ages. Two, probably three short-eared owls performed adequately from the Layer Breton causeway. Rainham for an hour this morning produced a/the young male marsh harrier putting the willies up more golden plovers than I care to, or can, count. And that's all I'm going to write.

This came upriver yesterday. It was, as they often are, accompanied by a lot of gulls. Unfortunately, the name was not as prophetic as I'd hoped it might be...

Surprise knowledge insertion! I used the word "tenterhooks" and couldn't imagine where it came from. Google returned this site that is written in an authoritative enough style to convince me it knows what it's talking about, so it must be true. Additionally, "baited breath" should apparently be "bated breath". Both phrases make considerably more sense knowing their origins.