Buzzards re-colonise Ireland

THE other morning I was watching a buzzard in the distance.

It was soaring a couple of hundred metres above the headland of a tillage field. Suddenly it crumpled as if it had been shot and plummeted to the ground.

It hadn’t been shot. It had spotted something edible on the ground and dived on it. Unfortunately it was too far away for me to make out whether the stoop was successful and, if so, what the quarry was. But I could make a few educated guesses, because a lot of research has been done on the diet of buzzards, some of it in this country.