Pittswood Birds

A massive Thank you to all of you who left the kind words yesterday, they were all much appreciated, what a kind lot of people there are out there, thank you  :-)

I was out for a little over 4 hours this morning, from 06:00hrs, my aim was to try and find some evidence of successful breeding in the local birds by finding their newly fledged young, however none were found, so nothing was added to the 13 species already confirmed as breeding here so far this year.

During my hunt for fledglings however, I noted an excellent total of 52 bird species, with one of those being new for the month when I managed to add a flyover CORMORANT (71), and in doing so brought the final May species total to 71. This is the joint 3rd best May tally for the 12 years, the same tally as 2010, the only real omission that could have been anticipated was the Garden warbler.

Three gull species were also recorded flying over, a good count for the end of May, they were HERRING GULL, LESSER BLACK BACKED GULL and BLACK HEADED GULL. A GREY HERON also flew through, and a SKYLARK drifted over in full song.

I saw the PEREGRINE taking food to the Tower at Hadlow village, while KESTREL, SPARROWHAWK and BUZZARD - all local birds, hunted over the area. A LITTLE OWL was again seen on the Greenhouse guttering, until chased off by a pair of BLACKBIRDS.

Of the summer birds, WHITETHROAT, BLACKCAP and CHIFFCHAFF gave some song, but it was well subdued in the cool and overcast conditions this morning, the only other summer birds seen were the SPOTTED FLYCATCHER at the College Grounds, plus the SWALLOWS and SWIFTS that hawked for insects over Migrant Alley.

PIED WAGTAIL on the manure heap at the College stables, ( I took this photo last weekend)

That was about it for this morning, but I did have a brief noon visit to the edge of the Wet Woods, when some warm sunshine had broken thorough, I was looking for Damselflies, and found lots of Azures, a couple of Large Reds, and a single White-legged, which whizzed off when it saw my camera, as did the first Beautiful Demoiselle seen this year, love to get another image of one of these lovely creatures.  :-)

I did get a few images of the Azures though.

Azure Damsel

Azure Damsel

Azure Damsel

Azure Damsel

Azure Damsel