Saturday 26 December 2009

The last two days have been dull, damp and dismall for my patch walks, however, todays walk makes them look good, the day started with squally showers, and by 09:30 persistant heavy rain set in - great!

It wasn't all bad news on the bird front though, I manged to find a good total of 46 species, despite ending my walk a little prematurely. The best sighting today was of both the local PEREGRINES cicling over the college grounds, it must be a good day when you see a pair of inland Peregrines!

There were 4 species that turned up today that weren't seen on the last two visits, 8 CANADA GEESE flew low over Migrant Alley, with a lone GREY LAG amongst them, a CORMORANT flew over the Greenhouse Complex, and at last a MISTLE THRUSH turned up, 3 in fact were in the Small Holding area.

The exceptional GREAT BLACK BACK GULL sightings for this month carried on, when 3 were seen going over the Tree Nursery as I finished the first half of my walk, a record count.

The walk to the lake through the wet woods was a wet and miserable affair, the rain got heavier, and the tree's dripped even bigger drops of water onto me, but two different parties of LONG TAILED TITS were located, I only had a brief scan through them in the conditions, nothing out of the ordinary was with them, only the COAL TIT, TREECREEPER and a GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKER were noticed. The lake was still frozen, even though the temperature today was at least 8c, the ice has now got an inch of water on it! It goes without saying that there was nowt seen there. I didn't bother with a walk round the scrub area, although I may of added a Goldcest to the daylist if I had, neither did I check out the Little Owl roost, I was just getting a bit fed up by then, and headed off home!

The camera is now covered in cobwebs, another pictureless post!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We had sun all day, Warren. But still not much to write home about. It`s got to get better soon.