Thursday 21 April 2016

High cloud slowly thinned, allowing some sunny spells to develop this morning, but a cool wind still blew.

Another uninspiring 3 hours were spent out on my patch today, where the arrival of those former breeding summer migrants, Cuckoo, Lesser Whitethroat and Turtle Dove now looks like it wont happen here, at best they will be recorded as passage birds, as will, if I'm lucky, the Garden warbler and Spotted flycatcher no doubt, sad times indeed.

I noted 3 LESSER REDPOLL fly over during a particularly baron sky watch, where just GREYLAG GOOSE, HERRING GULL and BUZZARD were other notable flyover species seen, but a SKYLARK sang from over the sheep pasture at Migrant Alley to cheer me somewhat.

The male KESTREL was up hunting around the Ashes Lane Fields, hopefully the female is on eggs now, in her box over at the Greenhouse Grounds, where I watched the male SPARROWHAWK whiz through.

Nothing on the lakes or in the woods to add to the months list, the BLACKCAPS and CHIFFCHAFFS in the scrubby Woods are busy building nests, at least they do well here still.

On a more positive note, I recorded my first Large red Damselfly of the year this afternoon, just one was seen in my garden, proper habitat!

1 comment:

Marc Heath said...

Well done with the Large Red, always nice to see the first. I managed another emergence first today (photos on the Blog). Also added a few ticks to my Nethergong patch list in the past few days. The competition is back on!!