Tuesday January 16 - Sunflowers

 Birdtrack is a fantastic thing. It's an on-line BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) site allowing you to input your records to aid their research and also for the benefit of the local county recorder. This is great, but it also allows you to "explore data" which means you can access a "recent sightings" map. This shows not only your records over the last three or four days, but also everyone else's. 

From this I learnt that a local birder, Rob S, had seen a flock of 400 finches (mostly Linnets and Chaffinches) but including two Bramblings at Beckett's Farm near Wythall.

I duly attended on a bright and very cold morning and targeted a field of sunflower heads next to the A435, where I guessed the birds would be. At the end of the field is a public footpath on which you could stand, slightly away from the traffic, looking back across the field towards Beckett's Farm. 

It was immediately clear that there were plenty of finches in the crop, but also that for a lot of the time they were out of sight. Occasionally something would spook the birds and they would all fly up, allowing some sort of estimate to be made. I couldn't get to the 400 mark, but made a conservative estimate of 120 Linnets and 70 Chaffinches plus a few Greenfinches and Goldfinches. 

This was very nice, but what I really wanted to see was a Brambling, and eventually I did. A female was perched on a flower head for several seconds. It chose to take off just as I got around to pressing the shutter, but I still got a recognisable image.

Brambling

Not quite sharp, but how often do you get to see a shot of a Brambling in flight? So quite lucky really. I later saw what I took to be the same bird at the top of an oak tree in the same field.

Trying to record the spectacle of a lot of finches in flight is something which I find very difficult, but I gave it a go.

Mostly Linnets

The Linnets spent most of their time out of sight, feeding on the ground. It's very much an all or nothing species in winter. I'm finding very few, usually none, as I wander around the Circle. But where the feeding is good, you can be sure that Linnets will be present in numbers. This is the second sunflower field I have seen around here, and both have been fantastic.

Linnet

After about an hour I couldn't feel my feet so I returned to the car and drove the short distance to Tanner's Green where I had planned to explore some more.

This was more typical of my roaming, producing mainly garden birds. The highlights were a small party of Siskins and a Red Fox.

A Fox through a hedge.