Lockdown List Update

Well today it finally felt a bit warmer didn't it, much more spring-like. The day was tarred for me however because somehow I managed to not see an Osprey, despite the fact at least five were seen this morning between the Exe and Charmouth. This included one that flew north over the west side of Seaton at 9am, whilst I was looking over the east side! Am surprised the gulls didn't react where I was but they didn't.

Wasn't all bad though, because finally I managed to get Cattle Egret on the lockdown house list! Every evening I have been checking the egrets flying down the valley at dusk, and haven't lucked in, but mid morning today suddenly there was one in flight almost above my garden, before landing in a nearby sheep field out of view...

Amazed it has taken me nine days to see one of these from the house, seeing as though two or three have been in the valley the whole time.

Also today Ringed Plover was a nice addition, with one in flight with a large Black-tailed Godwit this morning, along with a single Siskin east over mid afternoon.  The lack of Osprey wasn't the only annoyance today, as a Ruff was feeding this evening on mud underneath the airspace I can see, and I had a probable Little Ringed Plover fly in early afternoon, but at distance and non-calling.

Yesterday I managed just one lockdown tick, a last gasp Redwing over the house looking for somewhere to roost, just after dusk.

The day before (so Tuesday - not that I really know what day it is at the moment... mind you does anyone!?) I managed a few more ticks.  A Barn Owl decided to be vocal for a few minutes after dark, and I finally added Teal thanks to several calling also after dark. Another night time tick came at the other end of the day (just after midnight) when at least one of the local Tawny Owls actually decided to call.  Am sure many lockdown listers have noticed just how quiet Tawnies are at this time of year, as the females are egg laying.  My fourth tick on Tuesday was actually during daylight hours, with two Pied Wagtails north over the garden.

On Sunday a Moorhen was the only tick for me, again a heard only after dark. With a Great Spotted Woodpecker drumming on Saturday the one tick for that day - although I have heard him drumming most days since.

...and that brings everything up to date. As I sign off tonight my lockdown list is on 62.

Black Redstarts

Considering the impressive numbers of Black Redstarts that have shown up at various other south coast sites within the last week, I've spent my last couple of lunch breaks wandering around Seaton checking the usual haunts.  Yesterday this gave me two first-winter Black Reds around Axmouth Harbour (one either side of the river) and today an absolutely corking male on rocks between Seaton Hole and the end of West Walk.  

The two young ones at the mouth of the Axe were quite mobile and skittish, presumably due to the freezing cold north wind blasting down the valley.  Today's male however was far more obliging...

What a top draw bird, and a real privilege to share my lunch break with.  Kev also saw two Black Reds in Beer today including another ad male, so there's at least five about for sure.

This morning saw a nice little influx of winter thrushes too, with a couple of flocks of Fieldfare and several Redwings whirling around my housing estate this morning.  Not very pleasant out in the cold wind though!

Talking of not very pleasant out, rewind to Saturday which was an absolute wash out of a day. We had high hopes for some good sea watching, but in reality 07:40 - 09:10 produced nothing more than (all west);

1 Brent Goose
21 Common Scoter
345 Gannet
1 Arctic Skua (dark juv at 08:20)
1 Great Skua (08:40)
112 Kittiwake
70 auk sp

Yes the Kittiwake and Gannet counts are pretty impressive, and it's always good to see skuas, but the action died down fairly quickly and by 08:45 it had already gone pretty quiet.  And no stand out scarcity sadly.  There were no scarcities on the Estuary either on Saturday despite several checks, but the three Cattle Egrets were still showing around Boshill Cross...

Spot the three Cattle's!

And that's that.  As ever, thanks for reading.

A Quick Update

It's a rough old night and my hopes are high for the morning... which often means an empty notebook and two wet feet but we'll see.

I haven't blogged within the last week because as I haven't really seen much to blog about - which speaks volume about the three Cattle Egret I saw on Bridge Marsh midday on Wednesday. Just shows how time's have changed, it looks like we are going to have some wintering on the Axe again this year.  The lingering Greylag Goose is still around too, although I must just stress just because I've put this species in the same paragraph as Cattle Egret I am in no way saying Cattle Egrets will ever stoop to Greylag-level in Axe rarity stakes.

There's been excellent numbers of large gulls on the Estuary lately, but I haven't managed to pull anything decent out from then.  Common Gull numbers are increasing by the day however, and there continues to be a handful of Med Gulls about too.  The only snippet of interest from the sea were two male Common Scoters settled close in on Thursday...

Shame the light was poor, but you can see how close they were

Let's hope there's a bit more than that on the sea tomorrow morning however...

Arctic Tern

Although we've had wet and windy weather for most of the last week, last night the south coast got a real battering so I was keen to spend time on the sea front this morning.  It was clear to see it had been a lively night...

Looking east from Spot On Kiosk

I wasn't expecting to see many birds passing, and I was right; just two Kittiwake and a Gannet flew by in the 45 minutes I was watching.  I was hoping more for a storm-blown Little Gull or such-like, and was encouraged by the 300+ Black-headed Gulls feeding at various points off the beach.  Sadly there was no Little Gull, but a cracking juv Arctic Tern more than made up for that!  It remained on view the whole time I was there, feeding close in between Fisherman's Gap and the mouth of the Axe.  It even came close enough to allow for some reasonable shots...

Black-headed Gull above the Arctic Tern

Arctic Tern showing off the white-trailing edge to its secondaries, this would be darker grey if it were a young Common Tern

Arctic Tern showing nice short all-dark bill and again those lovely pure white trailing edges to the secondaries

I took this when it was much further down the beach, but I wanted to show how juv Arctic Terns can look almost Sabine's-like at times - they have such contrasty wings quite unlike young Common Terns.

Later in the day, early afternoon, I was delighted to see the Arctic Tern again, but this time on the Estuary!  Only the third Arctic Tern I've ever seen on the Estuary - I've seen more Black Terns here!

Arctic Tern roosting with gulls

Arctic Tern resting on the water, lovely cute head and small bill obvious here

Arctic Tern flying down the Axe - perfect wing pattern on show here

Again, but this one is a video still. Best pic showing overall shape in flight

The wind was still quite strong early afternoon, and when it is so windy I find using 'flight-style' pretty useless when ID'ing terns, but here's a video anyway. Sorry it's so shaky...

I do apologise for the overload of photos of one tern, but we never do that well for any terns here really and Arctic Terns are scarce - you could easily go a year without seeing one.  So I just had to make the most of a lingering and fairly showy one, in my favourite plumage too!.  I'm pretty sure this is my latest ever Arctic Tern, but I have seen a later Common Tern here (which is unusual), with an adult on the Estuary on 13th Nov 2014 found by Tim Wright.  One day I will use these pics to do an ID post for juv Arctic vs Common - I just need to get some pics of a young Common Tern now! 

I had another look along the estuary later in the afternoon, when it was nice to get some good views of six Cattle Egret in the field just south west of Boshill Cross...

4 of the 6 Cattle Egrets

Looking where this Cattle Egret is stood I do wonder how often Cattle Egrets get pooped on!?

There weren't many gulls on the Estuary, but one of the most distant flocks contained a second-winter Yellow-legged Gull which was rather nice, not a common age here...

Third from right along the back, a nice long-winged bird

Yellow-legged Gull again with wings up showing tail pattern

Four species of gull here allowing good comparisons of mantle colours and size

Not a bad day really :-)

Red Sky at Night

The evening of the 23rd produced one of the most spectacular sunsets I have ever seen.  To see people of all ages simply standing on the spot looking up was quite surreal, with others rushing to get better views.  It all started when I walked out of Co-op clutching dinner...

I relocated to the seafront where I watched this...

Become this...

Absolutely mind-blowing.  And to top it off, when the sky was lit-up only by this amazing red glow, a group of four Cattle Egrets flew in off the sea and headed north west.  A nice little surprise.

To bring you completely up to date with my local sightings, this morning a female Pintail flew up river with a flock of about 50 Wigeon, two Redwing came flying out of an Axmouth garden, four Dunlin flew up river and I could make out at least two Cattle Egret near Seaton Marshes.

Mostly About Egrets...

I didn't make it out birding at all yesterday which was a massive shame. It was the first still day for a while which saw a significant pulse of bird migration along the south coast of the UK.  I couldn't even cash in on the five Great White Egrets that flew west from Abbotsbury Swannery, and were later seen at Dawlish Warren.  They left Abbotsbury at 09:10, continued west past West Bexington at 09:22, Charmouth at 09:47 and finally Dawlish Warren at 10:30. I reckon they would have gone by here pretty much bang on 10am - right when I was conducting an appraisal at work! 

Oh well, I may have missed five big yellow-billed egrets yesterday, but this evening during a ten minute check of the Estuary, I saw five small yellow-billed egrets!  I don't know how many Cattle Egrets were actually present, as egrets were bombing about all over the place in the half-light, roosting in two different places, but five was my highest definite count.  As I said in a tweet a few weeks ago, to me it now feels like Cattle Egrets are here to stay, unlike their last influx four or more years ago.  Apparently there are up to 95 wintering just in Somerset! 

Here's three of tonight's five (plus)...

It was a pretty decent ten minutes along the Estuary actually, with masses and masses of pre-roosting gulls on show.  I wish I'd had more time to look through them, as a first-winter Yellow-legged Gull stood out in one of the first gatherings I looked at.  Another highlight came in the form of a flock of four Goosanders that flew downriver at 18:10. 

So a rather pleasant end to an all-round pleasant day....

A Counting Conundrum and Cattle Egret

So what are your counting skills like? Or estimating skills I should say... We popped into Greendale Farm Shop today (along the A3052 near Westpoint) and I was astonished to see the number of Linnets feeding in a neighboring field. I estimated 500 birds when I quickly counted this flock perched up, but what do you think?

I'll post the answer in a blog post on Sunday night, but before that I'd love to read your guesstimates. And I don't mean sit there and count them one by one, take a quick look, count them like you would a large flock of moving birds in the field, and let me know what number you come up with. Be so interesting to see the variation in responses. Is my 500 bang on the money, or would you go higher or lower?

I've been off work this week, and for the last few nights have been trying to get to grips with the Egret roost, but I've kept missing them! They keep switching sides, one night roosting on the Borrow Pit then the next night roosting in Axmouth - and I kept picking the wrong side!  Tonight finally I was in the right spot, and at Axmouth one Cattle Egret (which I reckon is a wintering bird that's been with us since Nov 2017, just been spending the day time north of the patch) and 48 Little Egrets came into roost.

Also tonight there were good numbers of large gulls on the lower Estuary at dusk. Sadly there was nothing better in them than this dodgy looking third-winter (I think) hybrid-type...

And lastly, Sue Murphy saw the two Musbury Hawfinch this afternoon, both from the car park near the Church.  Delighted that someone else has managed to catch up with them.

Right then, get guesstimating folks... 

Hawfinches

Aren't birds amazing. We've only ever had Hawfinch wintering on patch once, that was during the first few months of 2006. Now guess where I found two (eagerly anticipated) Hawfinches today - exactly the same tree that I saw my first patch Hawfinch back in 2006!

Hawfinch records are few and far between around the Axe. As well as the wintering birds mentioned above (two until late Feb '06, increasing to three and then five before they departed in mid March) there's been four other patch records before today. Two of these were of single birds seen for one day a piece in a private garden in another part of Colyton, with the other two thankfully being in front of my eyes. In 2010 early in the morning of 27th October I watched two Hawfinch fly north up the river valley from the gateway north of Axmouth, and then on 3rd November a single bird flew west during a vis mig watch at Beer Stables. 

With the current invasion I had a feeling the best chance of a settled one here was probably where the Colyton birds wintered, there's plenty of field maple in this area which is one of their favoured food sources. This morning was my third time of trying Burnards Field Road within the past two weeks, and it was third time lucky as on arrival two hefty finches were sat on top of a... well the bare tree. Success! First patch Hawfinches since Nov 2010. I fired off a couple of record shots...

I'm glad I got these pics because soon after both birds dived down into trees behind and disappeared (just like the 2006 birds often did!).  I sent a text out but a couple of minutes later there was suddenly an explosion of Hawfinch calls (that lovely soft seep) and they both flew up out of the trees and off low to the south east. Such a shame they flew so soon, but it's always a treat to see this species in flight. Annoyingly I don't think they've been seen again, but would not bet against them or others coming back here.

These cherry stone-crackers were a great finale to a good couple of hours out this morning, when I spent my time whizzing round the patch at breakneck speed checking as many spots as possible. Redwings were far more evident today with small numbers everywhere, the most being at Lower Bruckland Ponds where 12 Fieldfare were also present, along with eight Chiffchaffs in the willows around the top pond. A Lesser Redpoll was feeding with a small flock of Chaffinch on the Borrow Pit, and I was surprised to see the Bridge Marsh Cattle Egret had been joined by a friend, now two present...

So a lovely morning was had. And it wasn't a bad sunrise either...

When Wood Pigeons Become Cool

I'm going to kick this blog post off with a video. Make sure you turn the volume up so you can hear their wing beats...

Yesterday proved a major Wood Pigeon day for us, with James Mc seeing somewhere between 30 and 50 thousand pass through (I really must buy him a notebook!) though sadly I only managed to witness about twenty minutes of this. But today, with clear skies forecasted for the first few hours of the day, I wasn't going to miss round two. James joined me for an Axe Cliff vis mig watch 08:00 - 10:00.

There were fewer Wood Pigeons today (for us anyway) with probably about 15,000 seen flying west. Still, many of them passed really low over our heads, or just in front of us below the cliff edge. As the morning went on flocks started passing higher both out to sea and inland, so we probably missed thousands!  I tried to capture their magic on camera but it's never the same...

Although this would have proved enough excitement, there was plenty more to be seen this morning.  After three busy nights of thrush passage, it was good to finally see more about in daylight hours. There were almost constantly ones and twos of Blackbirds, Song Thrush and Redwing taking off or dropping in, along with my first three Fieldfare of the year west. Pity the four Ring Ouzel James saw here yesterday weren't still about, or some more, but hey ho.

I stupidly forgot my notebook this morning, so the higher counts are more like guesstimates, but this is roughly what would have gone into my notebook (west unless stated); 

3 Lapwing 

7 Golden Plover (a five and two singles)

15,000 Wood Pigeon

50 Stock Dove (probably a gross undercount!)

6 Rook

200 Jackdaw 

140 Starling 

70 Skylark (most of these were inland of us so we probably missed more than we saw)

70 Blackbird (total includes both settled and migrating birds)

40 Song Thrush (total includes both settled and migrating birds)

45 Redwing (flying in all directions!)

3 Fieldfare

10 alba Wagtail

50 Meadow Pipit

70 Chaffinch

3 Brambling (all singles)

80 Linnet

15 Siskin

1 Redpoll 

6 Bullfinch

25 Reed Bunting

With all these passing migrants the predators were having a field day. Two Peregrines were almost constantly having a go at the Pigeon flocks, plus we saw three different Sparrowhawk...

Sadly the fields at Axe Cliff are a shadow of their former self. Since they've been ploughed, flattened and replanted this year with winter crops, they're proving completely unattractive to ground feeding birds. In past years today would have also shown hundreds of larks, pipits and finches feeding in the fields, adding another exciting element to birding here, but today absolutely nothing. I really can't believe Yellowhammers are hanging on, but they are...

After Axe Cliff I had a 15 minute look over the valley. A Great White Egret had flown west past Abbotsbury earlier in the morning, and by my reckoning was due to drop in on the Axe any minute. Sadly though, having now missed five here this year (Bob Longhorn found another on Black Hole Marsh yesterday, which stayed 45 minutes), this bird decided to completely bypass us and flew up the Exe instead. Typical! The other bird I was hopeful for was Glossy Ibis, as yesterday saw something of an influx of these into the UK. Despite checking all the visible ditches and scrapes, no luck. Guess what Sue Murphy found on Colyford Marsh late this afternoon though, yes, our first Glossy Ibis of 2017. I had the right idea - just picked the wrong time!

A few days ago it was nice to see a Cattle Egret still with us. Or was, I haven't seen it since! It was feeding with a few Little Egrets near the cattle on Bridge Marsh on Wednesday...

Am really looking forward to some more vis migging, hopefully there's a few more sessions left in this autumn. The question is though will a Hawfinch reward my efforts?  Only time will tell...

Cattle Egret

An early morning walk down to Seaton Marshes would have proved quiet were it not for the recent Cattle Egret. It was showing well from the hide with the cattle on the reserve itself, although the cattle didn't seem to like it very much and often charged it away!

Black Hole Update

Morning visits to Black Hole Marsh today and yesterday have shown the following; 

47 Little Egret

1 Cattle Egret

12 Teal

14 Oystercatcher 

20 Ringed Plover

c50 Dunlin

c50 Black-tailed Godwit

5 Greenshank

8 Common Sandpiper

4 Green Sandpiper

1 Mediterranean Gull

4 Wheatear

20+ Yellow Wagtail

10 Willow Warbler

This morning's Wheatears were my first of the autumn, simply because I haven't managed to get up to Axe Cliff/Beer Head much in the last few weeks. There had clearly been something of a small fall this morning as some of the bushes and reeds were hopping with Willows and Chiffs, especially around Stafford Marsh.  In local terms it was an impressive count of Little Egrets early yesterday morning near Tower Hide, suggesting they've enjoyed a good breeding season.

Although tundra Ringed Plovers are probably very common migrants, among yesterday's (most distant) Ringed Plovers was probably the best tundrae example I've ever seen here...

The middle bird, a compact Ringed Plover with a strikingly dark mantle and crown

At the Birdfair I learnt a lot more about the fantastic Nikon P900, so am going to really try and get to grips with its various different settings and features. Sure should be fun...

Yesterday's sunset on the lower Axe Estuary, looking towards Seaton