WET MOOR
WEATHER: clear sky, a lovely afternoon of winter sunshine, quite cold though!
My first bird today was.......... a Blue Tit! After spending all day yesterday out in the field and not seeing a single Blue Tit, I was inundated with them this morning. At my bird feeder I also added Coal Tit, Eurasian Nuthatch and Common Pheasant to my year list.
This afternoon I collected my Guru friend, Guy, and drove to Wet Moor which is only 11 miles from Stoford where I live. Over the last couple of weeks this area has produced a lot of great sightings, it is a well watched area by a lot of good birders. Common Cranes are regular sightings, but recently there has been a Boneparte's Gull, Bewick's Swans, Tundra Bean Geese, White-fronted Geese, Goosander and plenty of common species.
from the road you can see why its called Wet Moor
Today we went there to took for the 50+ flock of White-fronted Geese, we also looked tentatively for the Boneparte's Gull (becuase it probably is still in the area!). We found 5 Common Cranes and eventually we found the WF Geese but they were at such a distance we could hardley see them let alone count them. Other birds on show were thousands of ducks, several thousand perhaps. We added Pintail to our year list, also Common Kestrel and a Marsh Harrier appeared.
Four Common Cranes, probably a family party with two juvenile birds
We searched for Great and Cattle Egrets but only located Little Egrets, a great number of Lapwings were also present and most of the swans were half hidded by trees and they too were distant. We only saw Mute Swans, the Bewicks were most probably behind the distant trees.
a lovely wintery afternoon at Wet Moor.
Despite our lack of new species my year list just climbed to 93.