Pittswood Birds

Light rain fell intermittently throughout this morning, clearing by 14:00hrs to leave warm sunny spells.

My patch visit today mostly concentrated on the Scrubby Woods, the reason for this being that I was going to be joined by Marc Heath ( Mr Odonata himself! see his impressive website here). Believing the weather forecast, which was for sunshine and light winds we met up at 10:00hrs in the rain, and set off, hoping that it would clear, but it never did entirely - that is until we left 4 hours later!

Not deterred, we had a good look around for our target species of White-legged Damselfly and Beautiful Demoiselle, which did begrudgingly show themselves, although the latter species was always just on the cusp of camera range! Marc did get a few record shots though, which we would have accepted readily from the Downy Emerald that we saw very briefly. Despite the poor dragonfly hunting weather, it was still an enjoyable few hours, made more so by the sighting of the first patch TURTLE DOVE (91,66) of the year, which flew from the telephone wires above the woods, a passage bird or a potential breeder time will tell, hopefully the latter.

I also found two more species for the years ''successfully bred'' patch list, with the first BLUE TIT and GOLDCREST fledgings being recorded as they were being fed by the adult birds in the cover of the Oak trees, I had already added GREENFINCH to that list when I had seen two newly fledged birds at my garden feeders earlier in the morning  :-)

KESTREL and BUZZARD were also noted whilst on our dragon quest, while a quick look over the lakes to see if the MUTE SWANS had hatched their young out yet proved negative, but it wont be long now!

Thanks to Marc for the company, I hope his images turn out ok, at least he got some, as I didn't!