Pittswood Birds

The weather had changed for the better today, a light frost under a partly cloudy sky, with just a light Northerly breeze.

 Sunrise

With Christmas visiting out of the way now, I had the morning to myself and carried out a 4 hour full patch walk in which a total of 44 species was recorded, that's about par for a December day. The lakes have at last come up with something special for my patch, a female WIGEON (110, 62 ) was present on the small lake, a year tick no less, taking the 2014 species list to 110, the joint second best annual tally of the 13 year recording period. With the Wigeon were 3 CANADA GEESE, nice to some of those back here, a GREY HERON was on the main lake, and the usual MUTE SWAN, COOT, MALLARD and MOORHENS were on the ornamental lake.

Only the Coal Tit was missing from the scarcer woodland species today, the Wet Woods and Scrubby Woods between them produced all the others, those being LONG TAILED TIT, BULLFINCH, TREECREEPER, NUTHATCH, JAY, GOLDCREST, STOCK DOVE ( which have started to sing) GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKER, and GREEN WOODPECKER.

A walk through the Small Holding produced the five Thrush Species that can be found here in winter, 24 FIELDFARE flew over, while REDWING, SONGTHRUSH, BLACKBIRD and MISTLETHRUSH were all feeding in the area..

Another pleasant surprise was had as I scanned the sheep pasture at Migrant Alley, there were 18 LAPWING (63) mixed in with the 100+ BLACK HEADED GULLS, thus moving the December list up to 6th place in the rankings, also with them were 19 HERRING GULLS and 3 COMMON GULLS, as well as the mixed ROOK/JACKDAW flock, all however were soon flushed up by an off the footpath dog walker :-(

Flyover MEADOW PIPIT, PIED WAGTAIL, and YELLOWHAMMER  were noted at the Greenhouse Grounds and the LITTLE OWL pair were agin at the Greenhouse Copse, again providing some nice images, they were just too far apart to get both in the frame though. The only slight disappointment of the visit was not finding any Raptors!

Little Owl, nice to get a shot without sticks or shadows in the way!

 Another image of this mornings sunrise