Goose for Xmas

Despite saying in my last post that I wasn't in the mood for twitching, I cracked today. The weather was good so I went East to go and top up my year-list. The target was near Norwich, the combined reserves of Strumpshaw Fen and Cantley and Buckenham Marshes. In reality they are really one area divided by artificial boundaries into one marshy, reedy area.
My target was a species only recently granted that distinction. Up to a couple of years ago bean goose was one full species with two sub-species - tundra and taiga. For listing purposes you therefore only needed one of them. The powers that be then decided that they were different enough to warrant upgrading to full species level. That of course means that there are two ticks available each year. I already have tundra, from Dungeness early in the year. Taiga I do not have - yet. The combined Cantley/ Buckenham area is a known wintering ground for them and one where I have seen them many times before. I timed my journey well and got there as dawn was starting to break. The two reserves are a large wet, swampy area with the river running at the far side. It is a magnet for geese in the Winter and you could see and hear skeins flying around.

Most of the birds were of the common or garden Canada goose variety. Mixed in amongst them were greylags and the less common barnacle goose, most of which are feral down south but still tickable!! As you can guess, they were all in the middle of the marsh and a long way off.!!!!

Closer to the path were large numbers of ducks including wigeon, feeding in large herds on the lush grass.

It took a lot of looking but eventually I managed to get onto the taiga bean geese, mixed in amongst the canada geese. Not easy to see and a long way off though.

Massively cropped in, the taigas' are the two plainer geese in the middle. They have a characteristic dark head with a long bill tipped with orange. After a bit, and for no particular reason, the three of them took off and moved out of sight down the marshes.
Their legs, if you can see them, are orange, not pink. This helps separate them from the closely related pink-footed goose. When I moved later on to Cantley there were hundreds of these in the fields, feeding and occasionally taking off in giant flocks wheeling around before coming back down to feed.

FinalIy I dropped in to Strumpshaw Fen, only a mile or so down the road. It was very quiet on the wildlife front, not helped by it being work-party day and a number of bonfires covered the fen in smoke. The only highlight was a lone bittern from one of the hides. It only showed once then disappeared into the reeds.

A nice day out, good weather and spectacular sights. Will that be the last tick of the year? Xmas always seems to drop in a surprise rarity - blue rockthrush, Brunnichs guillemot, Blyths pipit - so hopefully not!

A few bits and pieces

The year is rapidly coming to a close. There aren't any lifers around to go for, not even ones requiring long drives to tempt me. I should be hopping around the country topping up the year list but I can't seem to get the enthusiasm levels up for a 3 hour drive to see a bird on a stick I've seen many times before. I'm sure it will all get going again in the New Year when the list resets but for now I've been pottering more than dashing.
There have been both barn and short-eared owls at Woodoaks farm, only a mile away from me. I've been four times now but they only show either very early or very late when the light is, well, dark!

This is the best photo I managed to get. Horribly dark at the time. I saw them very early one morning and have dipped twice in the evening when they either didn't show or showed after I gave up and went home!
The farm is really good though for wildlife generally. They leave large areas of set-aside by the arable and sheep fields which in turn attract good numbers fo small birds. Whilst waiting for the owls to not turn up I got some good views of reed buntings

and stonechats. The latter were particularly showy sitting up in the sunflowers and cabbages left by the field edges.

The top two are of a female and the lower two are the more brightly marked male of the species.
I also managed to find a small flock of long-tailed tits in the woodland edge, balancing on the twigs to find food.

So, no rare or unusual birds or even any year-ticks but some nice birds all the same.

Hare today....

Nothing to do with birds this time. Well not much anyway. On a very dull, blustery and wet day we went for a hare walk at Welney in the Fens. I've been there loads of times, mostly for the Winter swans and most recently for the pallid harrier. A few weeks ago I saw they were advertising hare walks. This gives you the chance to go off-piste on the reserve and get close to some of the many hares in the fields. That is the thing about Welney - you are really restricted to the path and many hides along it. They look out onto the flood where the waterfowl are, but you cannot go out into the fields. The chance to get out was too good miss so we signed up (it's free for members!!).
We got to the reserve with just enough time to have a quick cuppa in the cafe before meeting our guide at 2pm. There was only us, two others and two guides from the WWT. With the clouds rolling in and looking very threatening we made sure we had our wet weather gear on and followed our guide out onto Lady Fen. This is barely 100 yards from the main centre but was behind a large electrified fence to keep out foxes. They are an issue with the ground-nesting waders in the Summer.
The plan seemed to be quite simple. Walk across the slightly flooded fields and see if anything pops up! Well, we didn't have to wait long. We had gone no more than 50 years into the field when a brown shape lifted up out of the grass and scurried away from us.

Hares can run at over 40mph when they put a shift on. This one was only just strolling though and quite soon dropped down out of sight. Carrying on with our walk we then saw another hare crouched down by a line of reeds. It was pretty flattened but you could see its ears poking up! As our guide approached the hare it realised we had seen it and scampered off. Fortunately it scampered right towards me!

 It must have been no more than 30 yards away when it banked off and headed towards one of the ditches and out of sight. A tricky photographic exercise to track it considering it was almost dark now. The rain clouds were rolling in and I had to use the ISO up to a few thousand. Trying to freeze an animal moving at 40mph gets a bit awkward at this point so I'm not too displeased with the outcome.
As we carried on we saw another 3 or 4 hares as well, but none as close as this one.

We also had a short-eared owl briefly over the fields and a marsh harrier but very distant. All of this was of course accompanied by whooper swans flying over for the evening feed at the main hide. As the rain really set in and we retreated back to the warmth of the hides we still saw a couple of hares moving out in the grass. They never go into burrows but just hunker down in low-lying forms to ride out the worst of the weather. Rather them than me.
We finished off by watching the evening swan feed but the numbers were down on other years. The feeding is still good out in the fields and we saw large flocks on the drive back. May be worth another trip for the walks, which go on until Spring, in better weather and light.

One swallow does not a Summer make..

..especially if that swallow happens to be in December!! Archetypical of long hot Summer days drifting over lush river meadows, the swallow departs our shores in late Summer. To see one after October is rare. To see one in December is almost, but not totally, unheard of. For that swallow to be not our common barn swallow but the much rarer red-rumped version gets the pulse racing a bit. When one was reported in Norfolk at Cley on Wednesday afternoon it created a bit of a buzz. I have seen them abroad but not in this country. They are near the top of my bogey bird list as well, having missed one by a minute at Cley a couple of years ago. I got to the beach car park literally as it flew over my car without me realising what the people were looking at!!! It kept going never to be seen again. To make this one more exciting it was seen going to roost in the small clump of trees behind the East bank car park. With a cloudy, mild night it looked good that it might stay so another early morning dash was in order. A very early night and a 4.15 alarm got me on the road at 4.45 and in the car park by just before 7.20. Surprisingly I was the only one there although to be fair it was barely light. I had a quick coffee and scanned the top of the wood. Nothing moving though there was a constant stream of geese, both pink-footed and brent, coming up off their roosts and flying off to feed in the fields.

This was the clump of trees though and soon another birder had joined me as we stared up at it. Fortunately we didn't have to wait too long. A small bird suddenly appeared skimming over the road and the trees. Definitely a swallow though you couldn't make out much more than that. As there are no other swallows around it had to be the red-rumped.

Unfortunately though the light instead of getting as dawn broke was getting worse. The photo above was when the sun gave a lovely red hue to the sky before the clouds quickly rolled in.

 After that it never really got light till I left after 9. The swallow was feeding over the trees, as you can see in the top shot. It was really hard to capture as it moved so fast and with the poor light I was pushing the ISO up to silly numbers to get anywhere near 1/125 of a second.

This is the best of a very poor bunch though. You can see the bits on it which allow you to i.d. it as a red-rumped version. Although a basic swallow in shape it has a clear white rump with a touch of red before it forks out. It also has that white neck band. What you can't see it the jazz of the bird which seemed more like a martin than a swallow.

At one point it had the fright of its life as a sparrow hawk came up out of the wood and very nearly grabbed it. As I was only one of three birders on site at the time it would have been a bad day both for the swallow and the assorted twitchers no doubt on their way. It stayed all day and roosted overnight again, being seen the following day in the same place.
On the way back I stopped off at Cockley Cley where Ashley Banwell in doing sterling work supporting the willow tit population there. There were loads of birds on the feeder in the woods and I got a willow tit calling once or twice but couldn't get a decent photo.

This is one of the many marsh tits, themselves not a common bird anymore, which were also feasting on the sunflower seeds.
A nice bonus of a day. I had supposed there would be no more lifers this year so that was a surprise. Still three weeks to go though so not impossible there might be a rare thrush out there somewhere!!

Worth another go

Winter has really set in now from the point of view of birding. No new birds to go for locally and I wasn't in the mood for a long drive just to get a year-tick. A half decent weather forecast and the promise of raptors had me heading down to Sussex though.
Target number one was hen harriers -which would be a year-tick for me, albeit a really late one! The location was the Burgh near Burpham. This is part of the Norfolk estate. It is also an area which is known very well to Wendy and Michael, two of our relations, who live nearby and have got some stunning photos of the wildlife there. The estate is managed in a very wildlife-friendly way despite  being a pheasant shooting estate. There are lots of large fields margins over-planted with wild-flowers. These in turn bring in lots of small birds and rodents which of course then bring in things which eat them. Hence it is a bit of a hotspot for raptors especially in the Winter. I met up with Wendy just after breakfast and we headed out to Canada Barn on the edge of the estate and walked out across the downs.
It was generally pretty quiet on the first part of the walk, till we got to the dewpond area. This is where two or more hen harriers have been reported over the last couple of weeks. A few kites were circling around and buzzards drifted on the few thermals available in the cold wind. The fields are very good for wildlife but not so good for viewing it as we quickly found out. At the bottom of the slope we saw a dark shape quartering the field to our left. The only problem was that you can only see it though the thick hedges which form the field margin. We found a gap and by peering through saw the distinctive white-rump of a female hen harrier.

Males are gorgeous white, grey and black specimens. Females (and juveniles) are duller brown but have that distinctive white rump once their monica of "ring-tails". In the low winter sun the colours really stood out but unfortunately we never got close enough to it to get good photos.

It, or rather they, were quartering low over the fields hunting for small prey. It had to be at least two birds as one had a distinctive hole in its wing where some primaries were missing. We picked up a possible third bird on the way back but can't say for certain it wasn't this one ranging into the next valley. It certainly covered a lot of ground and from where we stood by the dewpond it circled round us, at half a mile of more distance often. We could see it at great distance moving along the hedge lines and field margins, often dropping down presumably onto prey. 

It was raptor central round there, and from one place as well as the hen harriers we saw buzzards, kites, merlins and kestrels.

Otherwise it was mainly small birds feeding on the seeds and a distant hare.

After this, and with the light starting to fail, we moved to Pulborough Brooks for the short-eared owls. Wendy and Michael had seen 2 or 3 hunting recently so with the clock moving past 3 we were at the ideal time for them. The light had got really poor though with heavy cloud cover. Almost as soon as we got to the field a brown shape drifted up from the grass. SEO's will roost during the day in open fields, hunkered down in the grass. They come up to feed in the late afternoon and are the easiest owls to see during daylight.

We watched them for 40 minutes until it was almost dark. There were at least 2 and possibly 3 birds hunting over the field.  

The photos do not do them justice. For the technically-minded I was on ISO 5000 or more for most of them, trying to solve that insoluble problem of low light and a moving subject. They weren't worried by us hiding in a hedge and flew pretty close at times, seeing to eyeball as us strangers objects in their landscape.

Generally they seemed to ignore each other but occasionally they entered the same airspace and flew  up together before drifting apart again.

Another good day albeit one that left me with the desire for a bit more. I think I know where to go to get better views of the harriers and with a sunlit evening the owls will definitely be worth another visit. Never satisfied I suppose!!