Saturday 9 January 2016

I was out of the house this morning at 6.15am where I drove over to Nethergong where the plan was to park up and listen from the car for Tawny, Little Owl and the chance of a Woodcock coming into roost. As it happens, I heard and saw none although i'm sure they must be around. I did add a calling Snipe (56) in the dark which was welcome. The plan was then to walk up to the gate on the eastern boundary and watch the day begin but just before 7am, it started to rain heavily meaning I had a wait in the car for a while. Eventually it started to stop so I made my way to the gate and watched from there for a while noting 3 Grey Heron and 1 Redwing (57) which proved quite good. Birds noted were 818 Cormorant out from the Stour Valley towards the coast, 2 Redwing, c10 Fieldfare, 2 Common Buzzard, 1 Marsh Harrier, 2 Greenfinch (58), 2 Pheasant, 2 Siskin (59), 1 Great spotted Woodpecker and 1 Mistle Thrush. I spent some time in the woods looking for Woodcock but despite it looking perfect here, I failed to find any. Perhaps it just too mild still for any arrival in numbers. I completed the circuit where I noted 2 Long tailed Tit, 2 Goldcrest, 2 Treecreeper, 1 Great Black backed Gull (60) 8 Mute Swan, 4 Yellowhammer, 2 Reed Bunting and a few Bullfinch could be heard. Again, another pleasing session and with the year list moving on to 60 species, things are looking good. Still a few species I would expect to have seen still missing including Sparrowhawk, Skylark, Kingfisher, Lapwing and i'm hopeful if we get a cold spell for the odd duck to appear on the lake. For a small patch, its certainly looking good at the moment.

View from the Gate (Eastern Boundary)

6 comments:

  1. Already 4 species ahead of me Marc, :-) I do have a Tawny Owl on my list though! LoL

    Thanks for taking my suggestion of numbering your species, makes things easy for us lazy people LoL

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  2. By the way Marc,
    looking at your 2016 list, there 16 species on that I havn't seen here.....yet :-)

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    1. Nice that you have taken up the challenge. Hopefully with a few migrants chucked in, I can reach the 100 species target although I think it will be quite hard.

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    2. Marc, my earliest ever 100 species came on the 17 may, that was many years ago though, if I get 100 species now-a-days it is generally around September!

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  3. Marc.
    Like the new blog. Looking at the map and photo's it looks like a great patch with lot of different habitat.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Ken. Hopefully the odd surprise will fly over or appear throughout the year.

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