Sunday February 25

A cold sunny morning with a very light south-easterly.

Dave and I set off expecting the water bodies to be frozen, but in fact it wasn't as bad as we had feared. In fact the pool was almost completely ice-free, and the small top pool held a pair of Gadwall and a few Teal.

Drake Gadwall

Unfortunately that was about as good as it got. The Flash field hosted 27 Lapwings and 48 Teal. Our patch tally of Coot reached nine.

Teal

Dave spotted an egret in a distant field of corvids, and eventually we saw it perform a brief fly around before disappearing from sight again. We decided it was probably a Little Egret.

The lack of small birds is now extremely apparent, and I was left to take some pretty abysmal shots of a Buzzard displaying.

Buzzard

News from the patch and its surrounds

I missed a text from Chris L a few days ago. He had been to Morton Bagot and had seen a Shelduck and a Wigeon. These would both be year-ticks, but they are species I expect to see without too much difficulty this year.

Potentially more exciting, he also had two Tree Sparrows at Castle Farm, literally within sight of the patch. Just three fields away, but it might as well be an ocean because Tree Sparrows are site faithful to a ridiculous degree.

Nevertheless it proves the area did not lose all of its Tree Sparrows in that fateful winter five years ago.

Slightly further away, Neil D alerted me to the presence of 14 Hawfinches at the Virgin Mary Church  near Studley castle. Lyn and I called in on the way back from Hillers, but without binoculars, and they seemed to have disappeared. Definitely a place to watch though.

Finally, if you followed the link to Neil's blog out4aduck.blogspot.com/ you will see that there has been a mini-murmuration of Starlings visible from the top of the car-park in the middle of Redditch this week. Worth a look.

Sunday February 18

A cloudy morning with hardly a breathe of wind. The rather mild weather was encouraging more songbirds to sing, including Chaffinches, Skylarks, and Reed Buntings. Both Mistle and Song Thrushes were also in full voice, although they have been at it for over a month.

Song Thrush

Apart from 40 Lesser Redpolls, there were very few finches on the site again. The pool contained 16 Teal and four Tufted Ducks, the latter being an entirely predictable year tick. The Tawny Owl was visible in its usual tree.

Tufted Ducks

Teal taking fright

The flash field was better than last week, although that's not saying much. It contained 28 Lapwings, 23 Teal, two Snipe, five Black-headed Gulls, a Green Sandpiper, and the male Stonechat.

And that was about it.

Sunday February 11

Sunny intervals and cold with a fresh south-westerly breeze.

It was hard work again today. The flash field contained a Green Sandpiper, a Lapwing, five Black-headed Gulls and at least 39 Teal.

Walking past Stapenhill Wood I could hear lots of Pheasant alarm calls. The cause became clear as a Fox appeared in the field beyond.

Finally, I managed to get some shots of displaying Ravens over Bannams Wood.

Not a sniff of a year tick though.

Sunday February 4

A rather chilly but sunny morning. A light north-westerly. Dave and I did our best to raise the patch from its current malaise but it was hard going.

In the end the only year tick was an adult Peregrine which was upsetting the birds resting in the flash field. The latter comprised 60 Teal, and 53 Black-headed Gulls.

The pool was also disappointing; three Coot and 10 Mallard. I suppose the game cover is pretty much exhausted as, apart from 63 Lesser Redpolls, the finch and bunting numbers barely reached double figures.

Blackbird

It's always a bad sign when the only photo in the posting is a Blackbird.