Thursday October 27

A rare opportunity to spend the whole day at the patch due to Lyn getting the chance of an all day shopping trip to Solihull with a friend who is visiting from Australia. Everyone's a winner.

A cloudy morning with a very light south-westerly breeze, but the sun struggled out during the afternoon. I cut the day into several segments as I needed to return home a couple of times. The morning visit was ok, but I didn't feel that there were as many birds as last weekend.

I logged 13 Redpolls, about 100 Linnets, several small parties of Redwings and Fieldfares heading over, and a flock of 59 Woodpigeons heading south. Matt Willmott arrived and we had a nice chat before I had to leave. On the way back to the car I saw two Stonechats, and later learned that Matt had seen three. On the drive home I flushed a Green Sandpiper from a tiny pool at the roadside near the church. It turned out to be the only one I saw all day.

On my return I chose to park at Church Farm where the improved light allowed a couple shots of some wagtails.

Grey Wagtail

Pied Wagtail

By now I was on a bit of a mission to try for an autumn day list. My circuit down to the flash field and back added 12 House Sparrows (a decent total here these days), the Grey Wagtail, 41 Teal, a Grey Heron, several Rooks, five Song Thrushes, a Sparrowhawk, three Greenfinches, a Snipe, and the first Wigeon of the autumn.

Wigeon

The afternoon session commenced at just before three o'clock. I began by solving the issue of the disappearing Redpolls. I noticed a flock of 50 over Netherstead, which briefly landed in the trees there. By the time I had got my scope up they had disappeared, but I eventually found a party of 35 which which circled in the distance before disappearing into the birches at Clouse Wood. It would seem that this is the origin of the flock Matt saw on Monday.

A Mistle Thrush got the day list back on track before I headed for the ridge field intending to count the Linnets on the telephone wires there. I kicked up at least 21 Meadow Pipits en route, before estimating 150 Linnets, although a photo count only produced 122. Red-legged Partridges made it onto the list, and then, more excitingly, a flock of 30 Golden Plovers headed south.

Golden Plovers

With the sun dipping towards the horizon I decided to try my luck at the Water Rail pond. Sadly, it was almost dry and so my final bird of the day turned out to be a rather anti-climactic Lesser Black-backed Gull.

My day total was a fairly modest 58 species.