Trying

There was another strong easterly this morning. Several days of east and south easterly winds have blown a few continental waifs, namely Barred Warbler and Wryneck, to this the west coast, but almost 20 miles to the south of here.

Barred Warbler - Photo credit: Radovan Václav / Foter / CC BY-NC

Wryneck - Phil Slade

If there’s one there’s almost certainly another of the same species lurking yet unfound is my philosophy. So I set off in the opposite direction for a spot of “bush bashing” at Glasson and Conder Green, as likely place as any to try for an unusual bird or two.

On the way north I pulled in at Braides Farm where a Buzzard hovered above the sea wall until crows came along to send the Buzzard to ground level. A tight flock of 70/80 Golden Plover tore around the fields at low level before eventually settling down somewhere in the distant grass.

The path between Conder and Glasson was pretty cool and windswept. At the car park a single Siskin flew over calling but remained invisible. My lonely walk gave little of note except for sightings of a single Chiffchaff, 9 Long-tailed Tit, 4 Linnet, a good sized but very flighty team of 80/90 Goldfinch, and a group of 8 Little Egrets flying down river.

I checked a couple of quiet spots at Glasson including my regular look in Christ Church graveyard. It resembles the textbook spot in which to find a rare bird like a Hoopoe, a Wryneck or a shrike but has yet to deliver.

I was almost there as a small warbler flit through the tree tops but then called the familiar slurred “hweet” of another Chiffchaff. Nearby was the resident Robin in autumn song and just Blackbirds rather than rare warblers tucking into the autumn berries.

Glasson Church

Robin

 Chiffchaff

Blackbird

The church is alongside the canal towpath from where I could see lots of Swallows over the yacht basin just ahead. There’s still something like 500+ feeding and resting Swallows around and mixed in with them today 20+ House Martins.

On the water - 9 Tufted Duck, 18 Coot and the return today of a Great Crested Grebe. The grebes nest here in years when water levels are ideal and the spring and summer oblige. Not in 2015.

Great Crested Grebe

Glasson Dock

This was getting nowhere. It was too windy for finding warblers or much else so I drove to Conder Green to see the regular and always obliging waders and wildfowl. The counts today - 40 Teal, 7 Little Grebe, 6 Curlew, 4 Greenshank, 2 Spotted Redshank, 3 Snipe, 1 Ruff, 1 Kingfisher.

Another Bird Blog will be trying again quite soon. Please look in a day or two.

Linking today to Anni's Birding and Eileen's Saturday.

No Wrynecks Today

I gave the Pilling patch a good three hours grilling today but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary or much different from recent days. 

Meanwhile over at Heysham, 8km from Pilling as the crow flies, mist nets turned up both a Firecrest and a Ring Ouzel, while at Cockersands, a flap and a glide away, a dogged birder I know discovered a Wryneck! It’s the old truisms that “mist nets find birds which might otherwise go missing” and the other one about “being in the right place at the right time”. 

It’s a good number of years since I’ve seen a Wryneck, and many a moon since ringing one. We don’t get too many of these strange looking beasts Up North. 

Wryneck - P Slade

Today I was clearly both in the wrong place and wide of the mark with my timing so had to make do with commoner fare. Swallows were much in evidence at Fluke Hall with a group of 18/20 feeding above the trees and one or two around farms on the way home. In a few days no one will bother reporting them as they become widespread. It will be the same with both Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers, with today at least 4 Chiffchaffs and 3 Willow Warblers singing in the woodland and probably a good number more unseen. In the rain of Saturday morning there was even a Willow Warbler singing in my back garden. 

Willow Warbler

Back at Pilling a Nuthatch busily proclaimed territory as did 3 Song Thrush, a Mistle Thrush and plenty of Chaffinches and Goldfinches. The month of April makes birders look more closely at Blackbirds, hoping to see one with a crescentic breast patch and so become the elusive "Mountain Blackbird” or Ring Ouzel.

I must have studied twenty or more Blackbirds around Fluke Hall, and while none morphed into Ring Ouzels, I did note that most were males. Lots of females tucked away in the undergrowth on nests me thinks. 

Blackbird

Around the woodland, pairs of Buzzard and Kestrel, 5 Stock Dove mixed with in with 20 + Woodpigeon and 2 pairs of Pied Wagtail. I walked the sea wall but found no Wheatears, just a single Little Egret and 40+ Linnets in the damp stubble field. There are Lapwings sat tight on nests, Redshanks and Oystercatchers hanging about with intent but the farmer has done his first ploughing on the very adjacent field. The Lapwings are next for being turned over. Some things never change at Pilling. 

Lapwing

A blog reader asked about the tide in relation to the sea wall at Pilling. The picture below shows the tide in (on a calm, sunny day) on something like a 10.5 metre tide. The high tides are very variable, often much lower so that the water barely reaches the marsh and might be a hundred or more metres out from the sea wall. On very low tides the water might be way out in Morecambe Bay. In the left of the picture is Heysham Power Station.

Pilling Marsh

Pilling to Morecambe/Heysham

Join in Another Bird Blog tomorrow but there’s no guarantee of a Wryneck.

Linking today to Stewart's World Bird Wednesday.

... They Keep Fallin......

Yes, it’s still raining but I’m not going to let that get me down because I have just spent an hour fixing the tethers of a mist net then set to on my pliers with WD40 in preparation for Sunday morning and the second coming of Fieldfares.

I’m still going through the old slides so here’s few to be going on with, the theme being “peckers and others” - and they give me the chance to have a rant where necessary.

Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers have never been common in this part of coastal Lancashire, in fact quite uncommon but turning to rare in the 1990’s, then becoming virtually non-existent in the new millennium. I think they last bred in the Fylde in the early 90’s but the picture below was taken in a wood near Salwick, Preston in 1982.



The last regular place to see lesser spots in the Fylde was perhaps Thurnham Hall where the ringing group used to do some work until that too was developed, this time for “leisure”. “Isn’t birding leisure?” I ask myself. What I really meant was the site was developed for someone to make money out of it, selling timeshare flats and opening up the grounds to a free for all. There’s no money in birding unless you are the RSPB, a mobile phone or pager company or import the latest optical must have.

Anyway the next picture was taken on Merseyside some years later when a fluke catch found both Great-spotted Woodpecker and Lesser-spotted Woodpecker in the same mist net. Note the aggression of the larger bird towards the Lesser-spotted Woodpecker.



My own ideas on the demise of the smaller species is that it is linked to the simultaneous rise over the same time span in the numbers of Great-spotted Woodpeckers where both species must compete to a great extent for suitable nesting sites, where the larger species is predatory and where the Lesser-spotted Woodpecker has historically always been on the edge of its range.

The next pictures show Northern Flicker which I likened in habits and looks some weeks ago to our UK Green Woodpecker when one showed up in Poulton le Fylde and which apparently became the subject of some frenzied twitching and listing. Obviously the first two pictures are mine, Long Point circa 1990, the third and superb one, is definitely not.







The next two pictures are fairly old digitised slides, one has clearly taken to the new format better than the other. The first is a Wryneck I found at Marton Mere many years ago one early August morning in 1986BMP (Before Mobiles and Pagers). At first it was easy to watch, I re-found the bird on a later visit where if I remember correctly, several people gathered round to watch it. By the third and forth day it became increasingly difficult to find as it roamed around the site, hiding amongst the old tip material, and some people never caught up with it.



Maybe the second picture from Scilly shows why a Wryneck can be so difficult to see or find unless served up on a plate.



Finally, someone asked me if I had any more pictures of the Pine Bunting because they want to go out and find one this weekend. I found one more picture, but good luck, you’ll need it if it continues raining like this.