Friday 29 July 2016

A grey, warm and humid morning with bits of drizzle from time to time, brightening up later in the day.

The last two days have not produced much to blog about on my patch, apart from another pair of WHIMBREL that flew over Migrant Alley on Wednesday morning.

Today I carried out the 10th and final 'full patch walk' for July, which was amazingly quiet, birdwise, great difficulty was had to even reach the modest day count of 45 species. A fortunate encounter with the first mixed feeding flock of the Autumn, in the scrubby Woods area, gave me most of what was seen there, with LONG TAILED TIT, GREAT TIT, BLUE TIT, NUTHATCH, GOLDCREST, CHIFFCHAFF, BLACKCAP, GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKER and CHAFFINCH all tagging along together. I also saw the years first young BULLFINCH, the 41st species to be confirmed as successfully bred on my patch, this is probably the last I will confirm as such, but Little Owl and Tawny Owl will go down as probably bred, making for a breeding species list of 43, two less than last year and and 5 less than 2014, actual numbers of those species that breed are falling here too, that's habitat destruction at work  :-(

BUZZARD, SPARROWHAWK and KESTREL appeared for the raptor species, while HERRING GULL and LESSER BLACK BACKED GULL represented the Gulls. A flyover GREY HERON and a SWIFT were the only noteworthy species to do so.

Still not much luck on the photographic front, just another Beautiful Demoiselle shot to show, plus a Lapwing that I photographed at Bough Beech Reservoir yesterday afternoon, where it was very queit also!


Beautiful Demoiselle


Dozing Lapwing

5 comments:

Marc Heath said...

More Whimbrel. Thats the kind of bonus bird I need at Nethergong.

Marc Heath said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Warren Baker said...

Marc,
None here for a couple of years.....then two pairs ;-)

Pete Woodruff said...

Warren....Just realised it's three days since you last posted on Pittswood Birds, that's a first record isn't it?

Good to see you had a pair of 'seven whistler's' through today.

Warren Baker said...

Pete,
I missed two days........I was out visiting for one of those, the other was a poor visit, I'm not making the effort to write posts for poor visits any more, its just repetitive.