Sunday 16th May
We were in a wood not far from Worcester to attempt to see a bird that we'd not seen in the UK for almost ten years. The small carpark at Monkwood nature reserve was, not surprisingly, rammed with other birders that shared the same hopes so we had to park on the narrow road outside. As soon as we exited our car we could hear the lovely rising and falling melodic song of the Golden Oriole that we hoped to find. We used to make an annual pilgrimage to Lakenheath Fen to see and hear these beautiful birds but recently, in line with a national decline, they have disappeared from there so any Golden Oriole sightings these days are now subjected to fairly keen twitches. We spent three hours searching in the mature woodland on a grey and drizzle filled morning but I at least was successful when I obtained a five-second view of the bird, a first summer male, high in a tree. The Oriole was pursued by a pair of Mistle Thrushes that had taken exception to it being there. I photographed a tangle of leaves and twigs. There was also a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker nearby which called regularly but remained unseen. We did manage to see a Chiffchaff pair taking food for their youngsters in a nest concealed in grass beneath a small sapling.
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| Chiffchaff |
Tuesday 18th May
An after work stroll to our local go-to place to see recently arrived Spotted Flycatchers. It took us longer than we expected to see a Spot Fly but eventually one showed in a tree above our heads.
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| Spotted Flycatcher |
When we got back home we were surprised to see the return of a leucistic House Sparrow that we'd first seen in our garden a year ago and had thought that he'd gone since we hadn't seen him for some six months.
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| (partially) leucistic House Sparrow |
Saturday 22nd May
We went twitching, to the RSPB reserve at St. Aidans in Yorkshire. We were hoping to see a Franklin's Gull, a rare visitor from North America, which had been gracing the reserve every day for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately the Gull had obviously read the Old Caley's success rate in twitching birds in Yorkshire booklet because on the day we visited, it was nowhere to be seen. Predictably, the Gull reappeared the following day when we were back home.
Luckily though St. Aidans has a lot more to offer so there were some good birds to be seen while waiting in vain for the no-show Gull. Next to the visitor centre and carpark is a huge old and disused mining machine which was formerly used in the extraction of coal from the former mine that the reserve is built on. The contraption is now home to several species of breeding birds, most notably a pair of Little Owls, but also Kestrels and Stock Doves. After taking direction from one of the volunteers on site, we watched one of the Little Owls but after ten-minutes got tired of waiting for it to move. When we looked again on our way out the Owl was still stood in exactly the same place, in almost exactly the same pose, and I wondered if it might actually be a statue although I did see it blink once so I guess it must have been real.
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| spot the difference Little Owl (photos taken 6 hours apart) |
The main stars amongst the resident birds of St. Aidans are a small breeding colony of Black-necked Grebes. By mid-May the eggs had hatched and the young humbug-faced Grebelets were on the water and being fed by their parents. It was difficult getting clear views of the birds owing to bank side vegetation and I never managed an unobstructed, and desired, image of a youngster riding piggy-back on an adult. The red eyes of the adult Grebes wouldn't look out of place in a horror movie.
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| Black-necked Grebes |
There were hundreds of Swifts tearing around above the various lakes and reedbeds and I imagined that my Dad was flying around with them. I took a few photos in between bouts of searching for the Franklins Gull. I never could resist a Swift.
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| Swift |
Sunday 23rd May
A bird that we love to see but so far this year had failed to do so is the Wood Warbler. The various lockdowns had prevented us from travelling into Wales to our traditional site to look for them and we had failed to find any in the Wyre Forest on a previous visit at the start of the month. Since then I had done a bit of homework and had learned exactly where to go for them so on another dull and dreary morning, all of our visits to the Wyre Forest seem to be made in less than ideal weather, we parked up as usual in a quiet carpark and made our way along the disused railway line that is now the main trail through the woods. This time instead of walking into the designated nature reserve that hangs onto the steep hillside above a brook, we continued on for another half a mile. Soon we heard the unmistakeable trill of a male Wood Warbler. Because the land falls sharply away from the old track on the northern side, the Wood Warbler, one of three that we saw but by far the showiest, could be watched at eye-level and thus neck breaking viewing upwards was thankfully unnecessary.
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| Wood Warbler |
When a male Wood Warbler sings, the tiny bird (not much bigger than Wren) shudders with the effort. They can be surprisingly hard to follow through the trees owing to their bright yellow and greenish plumage blending in well with the foliage and they rarely stay still for long, a quick trill or two and then they are flitting to another perch or pursuing a tasty fly to eat.
A search of the nature reserve that we'd found Pied Flycatchers in three weeks before, turned up almost nothing except for a couple of elusive Spotted Flycatchers very high up in the very high trees and a pair of Chiffchaffs busy attending to their brood.
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| Chiffchaff |
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