Pittswood Birds

Another day of near gale force winds and hefty showers made for a difficult and frustrating couple of hours visiting my patch this morning. It was frustrating not to be able to hear much above the constant roar of the wind, there was just no getting away from it and it's driving me mad!!

I did at least get to do a circuit of the lakes and Scrubby Woods. On the way there, as I splashed my way though the mud and water of the Ashes lane Field, a couple of MEADOW PIPITS flew up and called, soon being carried far away by the gale.

On the water today it was again quite busy, with a good amount of species being seen, but nothing new for the year list. It was all change with the GOOSANDER, the two females seen yesterday on the main lake had been replaced by a male and female, also here, were 14 MALLARDS, 2 MOORHEN and at least 2 MANDARIN DUCK. On the Ornamental Lake the MUTE SWANS were still about, as was the KINGFISHER and the COOT, plus 8 Mallards and 4 Moorhen. The Small Lake had attracted 8 CANADA GOOSE, 4 more Mallard and just 2 Moorhen.

In the strong wind and frequent showers, it wasn't really conducive to searching the Scrubby Woods properly as I couldn't hear a thing, apart from a squawking JAY, and my mind was made up to move on when a large SPARROWHAWK came whizzing through! I decided to head off to my seat at Migrant Alley and watch the sky for Gull species shortly after.

Arriving at my seat, which was sodden and unusable, I set about best I could watching the grey sky, I had to dodge some short sharp showers, but Gulls were seen, unfortunately not the Common or Great Black Backed that were hoped for, just the usual BLACK HEADED and HERRING GULLS, I watched the KESTREL pair hunting, and at one point they were calling to each other, hopefully they will breed here again this year. The sky watch wasn't a total write off, as I picked up the first STOCK DOVE (59) of the year as it flew over, taking this January's bird list to the joint 8th best out of 13, the same total as seen during January 2004.

I think ive sorted the problem with blogger, I found that it was ''Auto enhancing'' my photo's once I loaded them, a quick ''Googling'' of my problem led me to tick a box behind the scenes of blogger  :-) So here goes, lets see how these turn out :-

This GOLDFINCH was buffeted by the wind, but it's almost in focus!

Back in my garden, during a brief sunny spell I snatched this ROBIN image  :-)

This NUTHATCH is probably the partner of the one that got ''sprawked'' yesterday