Red-footed Falcon, adult male, Hickling, May 11

This is often the initial view of a Red-footed Falcon at Hickling. Distant and in tricky light. Seeing the crucial details can take time and perseverance. Long-tailed enough to get you interested?

A closer photo of the bird can be seen on the ebird website https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/635534956

I’d spent Sunday morning since quite early on the Horsey Straight, hoping for a flyover of the wandering Booted Eagle. Pete and Dawn were already there thinking along the same lines when I arrived and Andy and Mick F arrived not long after. There had already been 7 Spoonbills over Sea Palling very early and we saw two more on the straight and three Greenshank over. Over the course of the next 3-4 hours, several Marsh Harriers and Buzzards were seen, a few distant Hobby over towards Brayden, Sparrowhawk and Kestrel but no sign at all of anything resembling a Booted Eagle. There was another report of a Red-footed Falcon, presumably the adult female from Potter and then Hickling since last Monday.

We eventually resigned ourselves to defeat and I went home for late morning coffee and an early lunch. A walk around the village was dire yet again with absolutely nothing of interest being seen. I had a lazy afternoon and then decided to take a cycle to Hickling in the late afternoon to chance my arm there.

A quick check on the pools on the way to the viewpoint produced zero waders of interest so I didn’t linger and made my way to the end of the track and set up the scope. I had a brief scan with bins and noticed a falcon sitting in the dead trees in the 100-Acre Field. Although it was obviously distant, it looked rather compact and perhaps a touch small… well worth further scrutiny. Upon looking through the scope I became more interested in it. The light was poor but try as I might, I couldn’t see any pale/white on the head at all. Redfoots can be extremely tricky in poor light and the pale cheeks can be surprisingly hard to see, particularly on flying birds but with a bit of time and care, they are usually visible.

More importantly, although the bird was in silhouette, I could clearly see the wing length and tail length relative to each other. They looked almost identical, which might indicate a Red-footed Falcon more than a Hobby, where the wing tips and often visible past the tail tip. However, there is still individual variation to take into account, so the tail tip and wing tip position is not all that much help on its own. Persistent observation over the next 30 mins made me pretty confident that the bird was a Red-footed Falcon as there was no white visible on the cheek or the breast and the head appeared concolourous or a shade darker than the underparts.

It was at that point that Phil Heath arrived. He’d been watching me watching the falcon and he’d been doing the same and had come to a similar conclusion. We still weren’t 100% that it was a Red-footed Falcon and were under the impression that the bird reported earlier in the day was still the same female present for the last 7 days.

As the evening wore on and the light changed, it became increasingly apparent that the primaries of the bird were clearly silvery washed as they caught the light, confirming the bird as adult male Red-footed Falcon. I put the bird onto our local WhatsApp group and then we had several views of it in flight as it moved from tree to tree over many minutes, although these didn’t add much to the identification other than confirming the general overall dark grey tones above and below and the silvery-washed primaries.

It wasn’t until the next afternoon that I discovered that the adult female hadn’t been seen at all and that the report mentioned in the Horsey Straight lay-by related to this bird. A good reason not to be getting bird news piped into your brain 24-7 is that you may get some serendipitous finds like this bird! A lovely surprise to end the weekend. I was wracking my brain and trying to think if I’d seen an adult male at Hickling before… despite seeing many over the years, they have been 2cy birds of both sexes and a few adult females, with a single juvenile, but I can’t recall an adult male at the time of writing.

Mike Edgecome got a lovely photo of the bird in flight and posted it to the ebird McCaulay library. It is reproduced above with a link to the website