Pittswood Birds

A much brighter afternoon, with some sunny spells, making it feel quite warm, enabled an enjoyable patch visit, well most of it enjoyable as you'll see!

I set off along Ashes lane and through the Tree Nursery to get to the lakes, I didn't see a great deal in the Tree Nursery, just a GREEN WOODPECKER and the KESTREL up hunting. Looking over the boundary hedge at the Pub Field I saw at least 60 BLACK HEADED GULLS, which suddenly took to the air, the culprit for their panic was a large female SPARROWHAWK going over.

I arrived at the lakes, not expecting anything at all after yesterdays shooting incident, and sure enough the ornamental lake was completely empty, the walk to the main lake takes just a minute, and on arriving there I scanned the lake and was very surprised to see a superb male GOOSANDER (62), what stunning birds these are!  This is only the second time Goosander have been recorded here in November, the other record was of a female last November, seen on the 12th and 13th. There were unsurprisingly fewer MALLARD about, and only two MOORHEN were seen. After the Goosander was flushed off by a noisy pair of rather corpulent ladies in the adjacent horse paddock ( now the leaves have gone there is little cover from this area)

Anyway, I lost interest at the lake area,  :-)   and decided to go over to Migrant Alley and see what was on the wheat grain I have put down, I was disappointed to see just 2 YELLOWHAMMERS fly off when i arrived, but I was more than happy at hearing CROSSBILLS in the sky! I looked frantically up into the blue, and was well rewarded with my best ever views of this species as four flew low over, I could even see the red colouring on the lead male bird , brilliant! I hung around until the light started to go, and saw a couple of SKYLARK and a MEADOW PIPIT go over, plus a LITTLE OWL called from the nearby Greenhouse Copse, also, nice to see, was a flock of 24 LAPWING heading over and dropping onto the Pub Field. The last birds seen were the flock of 30-40 LINNETS, heading to roost at the Tree Nursery.

Goosander - superb! As you can see i had to shoot through the bankside vegetation, making for a difficult photo  :-)

Goosander

Some of the Pre -roost Linnets