Sunday February 11 - Some signs of spring

It's been an unusual week, not least because Lyn and I went away for a couple of nights, our first "holiday" for several years. Sadly we were dogged by bad weather and poor health, so it wasn't really the bright new dawn we might have hoped for.

In our absence, Tony and Leigh came up with the best bird, pulling a Common Redpoll out of their mist-net at Middle Spernal on Wednesday.

Wing length 74mm and 2 grams heavier than Lesser

Immature male Common (Mealy) Redpoll (per Tony Kelly)

As for me, I tried a walk around Alcester Heath, just east of Cookhill, on Tuesday. One field there was full of Redwings, Fieldfares, and Starlings, but was very hard to observe due to a combination of furrows and weeds. I also found a couple of Marsh Tits in a small wood below the main road.

Yesterday I gave Lower Bittell a quick look, hoping the Great White Egret which has been resident for a few weeks might be visible. Unfortunately there was no sign of it (probably on Upper), and my only year-tick was a solitary Little Grebe tucked into the bulrushes.

When I've not been birding I've been finding other things to occupy my time. I have for example added a butterflies and moths Morton Bagot list page to this blog. This list contains no night-time moth trapping because I have not sought permission to trap any there, only moths seen incidentally whilst birding.

I've also deleted my Twitter (X) account after finally getting fed up of all the adverts, the algorithms dictating what content I should see, and in particular Elon bloody Musk. 

This morning I joined Dave at Morton Bagot. Our expectations were low, so we were quite happy to discover the first pairs of Tufted Duck and Coot here this year. They were taking advantage of the temporarily high water levels in the scrape field. We could almost imagine we'd got the pool back.

Tufted Ducks

Coots

We found four Stonechats, an unringed pair on the plastic tree guards, and a ringed pair in the scrape field. The fact that both the male and female were ringed makes me wonder whether this was a different pair to those last week even though the male was sporting a colour-ring on its right leg. Even with a scope we still couldn't read it.

Female Stonechat (ringed)

Male Stonechat (colour-ringed)

In the flash field about 30 Teal were displaying to each other, 21 Lapwings keeping them company, while the Shelduck drake has now been joined by his mate.

The pair of Shelduck

We also counted seven or eight Common Buzzards and a Red Kite circling on thermals over Bannams Wood.

So even though there were no additions to the year-list, the signs of spring are unmistakable.