BIRDING NORTH BUCKS AND BEYOND

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Some everyday Bucks birds

Silly title really.
ALL Bucks birds are everyday birds
.It's very rare anything unusual turns up in our county and if they should, they very quickly move on just as soon as they realise their mistake.
Most local birders joke about the Bucks forcefield that prevents decent birds touching down in this area but the facts seem to back it up.
Places like Wilstone Reservoir, Stewartby Lake and Summerleys, all just over the county line pull in some amazing birds.
I put in some incredible hours scouring North Bucks hoping to turn up something even slightly exciting. But it just doesn't seem to happen. OK over the years I have discovered my own Hoopoe, Wryneck, Honey Buzzard, Pied Flycatcher and a few less unusual species.
But it's not just me, no-one else seems to find anything either. A few years back there was a thriving birding community in the area but I think everyone got too disillusioned with never getting a decent reward for their labours and have just drifted away.
Contrast this to the neighbouring counties. Already this year Northants have had 3 Great White Egrets, Great Northern Diver and 3 Long-tailed Ducks, Beds have had Glossy Ibis ,Great Northern Diver and Common Scoter, Herts have had Little Stint and Water Pipit, Oxon had a Glossy Ibis.
What about Bucks ? Oh yeah a Cattle Egret. Good bird but that's all.
O.K I've managed a decent 82 species so far in Bucks but I was totally deflated to see some Geezer in Sussex already has 137 species for his home county, I'll be lucky to get 150 for the year. In fact there'll probably only be about 190 recorded in the whole of the county.

Anyway back to the everyday birds. some photos from Willen today, where it never got more exciting than a Water Rail, several Goldeneye,3 Little Grebe and a couple of Snipe,

juvenile Grey Heron

Canada Goose

Black-headed Gull

Greylag

A bit of excitement in Newport Pagnell this afternoon. I was working in Lathbury and looked up to see this.
A huge warehouse fire had broken out on the Interchange Industrial Estate.I could see the flames from well over a mile away
Caused a bit of chaos with the A509 having to be closed and needed the attention of some 60 firefighters

Monday, 6 January 2014

Guardian of the Golf Course

This rather striking pale Buzzard has taken up residence at the Bow Brickhill end of Woburn Golf Course.

Sunday, 8 December 2013

Steeple Egret

Buckinghamshire's fifth Cattle Egret ( amazingly I've seen three of them) was discovered last weekend at Calvert Lakes where it roosted every evening this week.

It wasn't until yesterday however that it was found where it was spending the daytime.

About a mile up the road there is a herd of cattle, which should have been the first place we should have looked surely. Not having a dig, just glad that somebody eventually did.

I popped out to see it this morning and found it quite easily in a roadside field at Steeple Claydon poking around in a field that had recently been spread with a nice lot of slurry that was attracting a few hundred Black headed |Gulls and several Corvids

Sunday, 17 November 2013

A trip to Farmoor

Local birding has been pretty unrewarding lately. So this morning I decided to take a trip to Farmoor Reservoir near Oxford.
There had been a few birds there recently that I still needed for my flagging yearlist. I wasn't exactly sure how many were still there but it would make a nice change to look around a site that I had only visited twice before.

On leaving the car park, around the water tower no less than three Kingfishers were using the railings as fishing perches.
On the reservoir itself Coots, Tufted Ducks Cormorants and Great crested Grebes were present in good numbers but other than a few Mallard, Little Grebes and a couple of Goldeneye there wasn't a lot else.
A walk along the causeway produced scores of Pied Wagtails and a few Meadow Pipits.

I always find it surprising how wading birds allow closer approach on reservoirs than they would on the coast or any gravel pit. This Dunlin proving the point.

I had almost walked the whole of the way around F2 - the larger of the two reservoirs before I found one of the birds I was hoping to see, this very dapper Red-necked Grebe - my first in several years.

The last decent bird of the trip was a rather confiding Common Sandpiper.

Friday, 20 September 2013

(it's) Ruff at Olney

I stopped of at Olney Mill this lunchtime, just to have a look what was around while I ate my sandwiches.
Other than an awful lot of Canada Geese there didn't seem to be much around.
But then a small bird got up from the grass almost under my feet and landed a few yards away.
To my surprise it was a Ruff.
This has been an exceptional autumn for this bird in the county but I certainly didn't expect to see one here.
It was an incredibly confiding bird at one point foraging in the grass just a few feet behind a fisherman who didn't even know it was there

Saturday, 24 August 2013

Blakeney Seals

A couple of weeks back the Bedford RSPB group spent the day in Norfolk.

We had decided to start the morning doing the boat trip from Morston Harbour out to the end of Blakeney Point to see the Terns and Seals.

Extremely close views were had of both Grey and Common Seals and Sandwich, Common and Little Terns.