Sunday April 14

A sunny morning with a light easterly and remaining cool. I arrived to find a Willow Warbler singing, and set out to see and perhaps photograph it before dave arrived. In the course of doing this I flushed at least the male Ring Ouzel, which was evidently still here. I managed a horrible blurred photo of the warbler before it shifted position and I returned to my car.

Dave arrived and parked. As he was getting out of the car and I was telling him about the White-tailed Eagle which had flown over Upton Warren, when I looked up to see a large raptor over the rise. Sadly not an eagle, but a Red Kite.

Red Kite

I managed a few shots, mostly out of focus, before it disappeared. We went straight to the horse field  and had no trouble locating the pair of Ring Ouzels.

Ring Ouzel

The field also contained several other thrushes, and we eventually added one Redwing and 10 Fieldfares to the list. The only down-side was that the Willow Warbler had stopped singing and could not be found.

We started our usual route, seeing a Muntjac, and noting that bird song was a little reduced because of the coolness.

Muntjac

Nevertheless at least one new migrant had turned up. We flushed a male Redstart from the hedge just beyond the former pool. Attempts to photograph it were almost futile, the only shot I got was basically a picture of the hedge with a tiny image of the bird if you really looked. Oh well, it could be the only one this year so I'm showing it anyway.

Redstart (centre of the frame if you zoom in)

Redstarts have an annoying habit of just disappearing, and we eventually gave up trying to re-find it.

We switched our attention to the flash field. It contained a pair of Shelducks, about eight Teal, at least five Snipe, two (maybe three) Green Sandpipers, four (probably five, and maybe six)  Little Ringed Plovers, six Black-headed Gulls, and no trace of the Little Egret or any Redshanks. The reason for the uncertainty about wader numbers was that the birds were extremely active and ranging over a wide area.

Most birders are used to possibles and probables, and we are no exception. During the course of the morning Dave thought he might have heard a Lesser Whitethroat, we both heard an odd wader-like call from something flying invisibly over (I thought it sounded Turnstone-like, Dave thought vaguely Whimbrel-like but not quite right), and finally we flushed a non-calling pipit-like bird from the long grass of the ridge field which could have been a Tree Pipit, or perhaps it wasn't. We couldn't relocate it. A further mystery was a pile of snow white feathers.

Maybe just an unfortunate white dove, or maybe the fact we hadn't seen the Little Egret today was more significant than we had thought.

One bird that was still present was the Whitethroat. It sang from exactly the same bushes as on Thursday, but this time it didn't show.

Finally, back at the Ring Ouzel field we found a pair of Wheatears to round off the morning nicely.