What do you do to help pass the time on a long bus journey? Read, sleep, listen to music, do crosswords or puzzles? I had taken along my knitting for the three-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Cardiff to London, but I didn’t knit a single stitch.

I spent the 15 minutes waiting for the bus watching the earth of a molehill moving as the little mole tidied up its tunnel (and, of course, I was hoping it might poke its head out, but no such luck). And, once we were underway, we hadn’t cleared Cardiff’s suburbs before I spotted my first buzzard hovering over a park so, after that, I decided to abandon my knitting and keep my eyes on the countryside that was whizzing past outside the window.

And what did I see? My list reads as follows: Lesser black-backed gulls, Herring gulls and Black-headed gulls, Carrion crows, Robins, Jackdaws, Pied wagtails, Feral and Woodpigeons, Magpies, Starlings, Mallards and Mute swans, Mistle thrushes and Blackbirds, a Rookery, lots of rabbits and Pheasants, and two small groups of deer, plus, of course, the 18 Buzzards alluded to in the title of this blog. I was very impressed to see so many of them.