Pittswood Birds

There was a hard frost this morning, which rapidly lifted as cloud drifted over just before dawn. Around 10:00hrs there were some short lived sunny spells....a bit of a bonus!

Once again, as yesterday, there was a gathering of half a dozen REDWING on the Ashes Lane Fields, they were with 30-40 STARLING, 2 MISTLETHRUSHES and 18 MEADOW PIPITS.

I wasn't expecting anything on the lakes, I knew they would be frozen over, but I was very pleasantly surprised when I found a male TUFTED DUCK (59) on the main lake, it was sheltering under the overhang of the bankside trees where the water was still free of ice, this is a real scarce bird species on my patch, a very pleasing find indeed  :-) A GREY HERON sat in a bankside tree, the only other visitor to the lakes.

I walked back through the Wet Woods, where I saw a BUZZARD skillfully fly through the tangled branches of the trees, I also saw a GREY WAGTAIL on the pools of stagnant water and spent over an hour trying to photograph it, but despite getting reasonably close to it, the light was awful, very frustrating! Whilst I was trying to secure a reasonable image of the Grey wagtail I heard NUTHATCH, COAL TIT and TREECREEPER call, as well as seeing GREAT SPOTTED and GREEN WOODPECKERS chasing about, the former have started to drum in earnest now, also around 15 CHAFFINCHES were feeding among the leaf litter.

I spent a couple of hours out on the fields and around the Greenhouse Grounds, not seeing anything too exciting, flyovers from 3 single YELLOWHAMMERS, a lone SKYLARK and another Buzzard were had, plus 100+ BLACK HEADED GULLS were out on the sheep pasture, 3 BULLFINCH were a good sight to see at the Greenhouse Grounds where the KESTREL pair continue to find plenty of prey.

Despite lots of blue sky, the sun stubbornly remained behind what cloud there was, this image of the Grey Wagtail in the Wet Woods was about the best of the 94 I took! High ISO's and poor shutter speeds just dont make for nice images  :-(

I watched it flicking over the leaf litter, under which it found several morsels 

Grey Wagtail