Waxwings from the garden

After the trauma of driving home from work through heavy snow yesterday, I decided to settle for a nice quiet day watching cricket (the less said the better), and generally relaxing in the house with Lyn. Inevitably this resulted in a great deal of garden birding, our feeders fully stocked, and the snow scraped away to reveal apples placed on the lawn.

For the most part we just saw the usual House Sparrows, Dunnocks, and Blackbirds, although a Pied Wagtail very nearly landed in the apple tree before choosing the neighbour's peach tree instead.

Then, having earlier noticed about 20 Fieldfares flying around I spotted what I thought might be a Fieldfare at the top of a tree further down the close. My binoculars revealed it was a bit better than that, and I shouted "Waxwing" and rushed to get Lyn. In fact it was a clump of Waxwings, we initially thought three birds. I opened the back door to chuck another apple out and found I could hear them calling even though they were about 150 yards away.

Shortly afterwards we saw them fly off (in the general direction of Morton Bagot !) and counted four birds as they flew.

The clump of Waxwings

I have seen Waxwings from the garden before (2005 and 2010) but these were my first this winter as I have made virtually no attempt to twitch any.