A mostly cloudy, but warm day. A strengthening SW wind brought light rain by 14:00hrs.

TAWNY OWL (49) was added to the September bird list when a pair were heard last night as I lay awake  :-)

I spent the early part of the morning walking Migrant Alley and searching the Greenhouse Grounds, the latter produced, of note, a couple of COMMON WHITETHROAT and a CHIFFCHAFF, plus the dwindling flock of mixed GOLDFINCH/GREENFINCH.

It was good to find another 2 WHINCHAT at Migrant Alley, no other passage birds were found today though, although a nice flock of LINNETS, some 24 strong were on one of the paddocks.

A 90 minute sky watch was made, which added three more species to the month list, those being CANADA GOOSE (50) GREYLAG GOOSE (51) and HOUSE MARTIN (52). Once again four Raptor species were seen up hunting - BUZZARD, SPARROWHAWK, KESTREL and HOBBY.

The Whinchat wouldn't play ball when it came to photographing them, so it's back to the Wheatear I found yesterday for todays blog brighteners.

Hazy sunshine and light winds made for a very pleasant first day of Autumn.

As always on the first day of the new month, I undertook a full patch walk, during which, the five hour visit, plus a two hour afternoon visit produced a good tally of 48 bird species.

In the calm conditions it proved excellent for scanning the sky for Raptor species and a fantastic five species were recorded, those being KESTREL, BUZZARD, SPARROWHAWK, HOBBY and PEREGRINE of which there were a pair up together, typical they should turn up as they were not on last months list!

Migrant Alley turned up a few migrant species, with a YELLOW WAGTAIL, a WHINCHAT and 3 WHEATEAR all present, good to have a few of the latter coming through in numbers at last.

All the local breeding woodland species turned out today, except Songthrush and Mistlethrush, the best of those being GOLDCREST, LONG TAILED TIT, COAL TIT, BULLFINCH, NUTHATCH, TREECREEPER, JAY, STOCK DOVE, GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKER and GREEN WOODPECKER, even the lakes chipped in, with a MANDARIN DUCK seen on the main lake.

I got a distant shot of the Mandarin Duck

BLACKCAP, CHIFFCHAFF, COMMON WHITETHROAT and SWALLOW made up the rest of the Summer birds seen today. Apart from the Raptor species, the only flyovers were from HERRING GULL and BLACK HEADED GULL, these drifted over from the south of my patch where there were at least 500 mixed Gulls that were flushed up, but not by the hoped for Osprey!

During the afternoon visit 2 SKYLARKS flew from the sheep pasture at Migrant Alley as I was photographing the Wheatears. I took plenty of images of them, here's a few, I'll put the rest up on tomorrows post  :-)

Wheatear