Early sunshine this morning was replaced by cloudier conditions by 07:30hrs, which by mid afternoon gave a bit of drizzly rain.

I covered most, but not all parts of my patch during the 4 hour visit, but it was, as expected, very quiet on the bird front, as is always the case in June many birds are secretively feeding young or hiding away while they moult. I did however find a reasonable tally of species, 41 in all, with the undoubted highlight being a fast moving HOBBY (58) that sped low over the Scrubby Woods, one more for the June list!

The Scrubby Woods had the best of what was on offer today, with plenty of BLUE and GREAT TIT families feeding up in the Oak canopy, but I am yet to find a Coal Tit family, I think I may of missed those whilst in wales, along with the first Chiffchaff and Blackcap families! A pair of TREECREEPERS looked as though they may have had young nearby, but the NUTHATCHES were less secretive, their calls and whistles made it easy to locate the immature birds.  A male BULLFINCH showed itself, this is another species that I yet to find recently fledged young for this year. A sighting of a JAY was my first for two days, the young of these can be tricky to track down, as they tend to sit quietly up in the high branches of the Oaks.

Nothing on the lakes today apart from 16 CANADA GEESE and 5 moulting MALLARDS, I'm still hoping for a Mandarin to show up for the months list, although they have not bred in the nearby Wet Woods this year, as they have in the previous three years, since it became a dog playground even the Mallards have failed to breed their this year!

I added a Butterfly species to the year list when during the early sunshine a Small Skipper was seen at the Greenhouse Grounds, a Beautiful Demoiselle was the best of the Odonata seen today.

Back to the Wales holiday photo's to brighten the blog today, this species will at least give pleasure to a certain fellow blogger i'm sure  :-)

Stonechat

No post yesterday, as the broadband in my area was not working for some reason, which wasn't anything to do with unpaid bills, despite what some have said  :-)

Anyway, not much was missed, the only real occurrence of note was the finding of the first PIED WAGTAIL young of the year, two were being fed on the lawn of a large garden off Ashes lane.

Today, in some warm sunshine, but a cooling wind, things picked up a bit with another addition to the 'successfully bred' year list being found, that being the SONGTHRUSH, three very lively and healthy looking recently fledged birds flew from a dense bush at the Small Holding area, this brings the total number of species with fledged young to 29.

Among the other 42 species seen today, were a couple of new ones for the months list, the first being a KINGFISHER (55) that was seen at the main lake, I didn't count on that one turning up this month, the other was  HOUSE MARTIN (56) at least five flew over along with a few SWIFTS.

The regular three raptor species were all seen up hunting this morning, those being KESTREL, SPARROWHAWK and BUZZARD, but a real bonus raptor species for the month was seen later in the afternoon when a RED KITE (57) flew low over my garden, superb! Just 3 species needed this month now to equal the lowest June tally ever and 7 to reach the mean average tally for June!

Back to yesterday for todays images. I had a visit to Sevenoaks Wildfowl Reserve, which was teeming with damsels and the odd Dragon, allowing for some photographs  :-)

This is a ''Rufescens'' form of the female Blue Tailed Damselfly

There lots of these Banded Demoiselles about too

A couple of Black Tailed Skimmers were found

The whole place was heaving with common Blue Damselflies

Some were found in 'Tandem'

Others were mating