A few local niceties

 Not all trips have to involve long drives and mega-rare birds. Sometimes it is nice to just go local, which is very much with the zeitgeist for this year anyway. So, I had a couple of mini trips to Maple Lodge, my local nature reserve, and Woodoaks Farm, which is barely half a mile away from there. For those who don't know, the former is an old sewage works now run by the conservation society of which I am am a long-standing member. The latter is a very environmentally-friendly farm now run by the Soil Association.

The first trip to the Lodge was on a very cold and foggy afternoon. I only went to one of the hides there, Rotunda, which is on the edge of a marshy area with reed beds and is where a pair of water rail had been showing well. They are a bit of a local speciality and attract a steady stream of admirers. When I go there two other local "faces" were already in the hide but the rail hadn't been seen for an hour or so. I topped up the feeders and settled down to wait.

The only problem with Rotunda in the afternoon is that you are looking straight into the setting sun. It gave a lovely glow to the reeds but meant that any birds were silhouetted. The many moorhens seemed pleased with the seed I had put out and a lone dabchick found a bit of unfrozen water to feed in.

 Eventually the star of the show turned up. I first heard it squealing in the reeds, it's characteristic call likened to a pig! Then it dashed out to grab some seed, much to the annoyance of the moorhens who don't allow any interlopers.

You can see how cold it was by the fact it was walking on the ice! It was pretty nervous and didn't show again for 30 minutes or so till it, or its partner, popped up to the right of the hide in slightly better light.

The area behind it was where our kingfishers nested so fingers crossed for them choosing this as a good site again this year.

My second trip was to Woodoaks. It is always very popular here, having expanded its remit from just farm to tea shacks, micro-brewery and a resident artist. Certainly the tea shack was busy on a dull, misty and cold afternoon,

It is very good for small birds due to the large amount of set aside and field edges left to go to seed. At the very start of the entrance track one of the overwintering pair of stonechats was sitting up on the vegetation looking at what I was up to.

At the top of the track is a whole field left to go to seed and not cleared up. It had sunflowers in the Autumn and now is very popular with a large mixed flock of chaffinches and linnets, numbering into the hundreds.

They spent most of their time flying between the trees and the field, where the whole flock would just disappear into the rank vegetation to feed. This attracted the interest of the local kestrel, flushing the flock back into the air in a mini-murmuration.

There was one  bird I was trying to find. One or two bramblings had ben reported as being present over the previous days. These are Winter visitors, very similar in looks and habits to our chaffinches. I spent ages going through the chaffinch flock when they perched up, the only real chance you had of finding it. 

It really wasn't easy though. The flock were alway on the move and as you can see the light was awful. After 15 minutes of study though I finally found a female brambling sitting in with the chaffinches. 

You will have to trust me on this one but it is the top bird in the photo. The white belly and more bold-marked back are a give away, but I did have slightly better views through my bins before it flew back into the field to feed and not be seen again! I didn't see any yellowhammers in the flock, which is worrying as they are normally found here but perhaps I was just unlucky.  

A nice couple of trips and 2 more birds for the yearlist but but I'm looking forward to the sun coming back next week!