Wednesday 30 November 2016

Both yesterday morning and this morning were cold and frosty,  but with plenty of sunshine and light winds, it felt very pleasant out on my short patch visits.

Early visits to the Lakes and Scrubby Woods were made on both mornings, yesterdays highlight was finding a pair of TEAL (64) on the main lake, a new species for the months list. This morning however saw the lakes 90% frozen over, limiting what was seen to Mallards and Moorhens. The adjacent Scrubby Woods had the usual good variety of bird species present, which included among the more common species were; NUTHATCH, TREECREEPER, GOLDCREST, BULLFINCH, LONG TAILED TAILED, COAL TIT, GREEN WOODPECKER, GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKER and SISKIN.

A walk around the farmland parts of my patch didn't provide much of note on the ground, but a flyover LAPWING was nice and a SNIPE (65) that flew over Migrant Alley was another for the months list. The female KESTREL was hunting over the Ashes Lane Fields, where a BUZZARD was also seen flying low over. A GREY WAGTAIL was seen at the Greenhouse grounds.

So November ended with a couple of new species right at the death, taking the months bird tally to 65, which is just one short of the mean species total achieved for the previous five Novembers, and takes it to joint sixth place out of fifteen ( joint with 2013) in the rankings.


Goldcrest

4 comments:

Pete Woodruff said...

You made no comment about when and where you took the Goldcrest pic Warren, but it's to say the least pretty impressive....Gold Award, luv it.

Warren Baker said...

Pete,
The Goldcrest image was taken in Dec 2014, I thought i'd put up an image to reflect the frosty conditions :-)

Ken. said...

Warren.
good to see you managed to add a couple of new species to your months list. Ditto what has already been said about your picture. It's a beauty.

Warren Baker said...

cheers Ken :-)