This morning I decided to head for St Bartholomews church, Tardebigge in the hope of locating the Hawfinch seen there recently. I'm not very familiar with the wild west of my Circle, and took a wrong turning on the way, getting totally lost in Batchley before finally rocking up just in time to be knee-deep in kiddies and their parents dropping them off at the school next to the church.
So I suppose it's not too surprising the the next hour produced nothing better than a Mistle Thrush, a Treecreeper, and several Nuthatches. I decided to head down to the canal and follow it until I got to Tardebigge Reservoir.
It looked pretty much the same as my last visit, April 1999. Three Great Crested Grebes bobbed up and down on the water, a number of Mallards quacked around the edge, and a substantial flock (177) of Black-headed Gulls occupied the middle.
The number of times I've scanned through local flocks of Black-headed Gulls and found nothing doesn't bear thinking about. This time however, I noticed this.
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| Look familiar ? |
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| It can't be ! |
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| It bloody is ! |
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| Adult Mediterranean Gull |
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| So white |
This is the first record of Mediterranean Gull for Tardebigge Reservoir (I checked), and my first for the Redditch area. Any disappointment over the non appearance of the Hawfinch was blown away.
Med Gull is a pretty regular visitor to well-watched water bodies in Worcestershire, even back in 1999. However another bird I saw on that April day at Tardebigge Reservoir was Tree Sparrow, and they have almost entirely gone from the county.
The times, as Bob Dillon once said, they are a changing.
Nice find Rich. Not many records for the Redditch area I'm sure, but I think there must have been at least one at Arrow Valley Lake? Also one or two at Lower Park, back when it was 'good'!
ReplyDeleteHi Mike, you're absolutely right about the records for AVL and Lower Park. Earlswood's also had quite a few.
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