Sunday 28 January 2018

27th January

Bitterly cold wind yesterday and the recent rain had left some small remnant flooding in the Bottom Fields. As I was hanging out some washing (ah, the jet-setting life of a Yorkshire birder!) I could hear geese so I headed down that way.
A good sized Lapwing flock flew in, around 200 birds, but instead of landing in the flood field they did their flickering predator reaction and headed off south-east. The cause soon appeared, a cracking male Peregrine. The first I have had for a couple of years. It did one quick sweep over the fields and then powered off through The Gap between Ainderby & Morton.

On the floods and neighbouring fields there were a total of just over 50 Greylags…


75 Black-headed Gulls, six Mallard and eight Curlew…


The only other birds I added to my year list were a pair of Teal on the Magic Garden lake, a single Common Gull with the Black-headed Gulls and a handful of Skylarks in the Back Lane fields. A flock of 11 Siskin flew high east over the Magic Garden.

Late in the evening I saw seven smaller geese flying over, I didn’t have bins and it was almost dark but there were seven Whitefronted Geese at Scaling Dam today, I wonder…

Sunday 7 January 2018

7th January

My final parish bird list for 2017 was a distinctly feeble 101 species, the loss of wader habitat is probably the main reason so waking yesterday to quite extensive floods in the Bottom Fields I was hopeful of kicking off the new year with one or two goodies.


In the end it was quiet, the only wildfowl were 22 Mallard and half a dozen Greylags. There were reasonable numbers of gulls on the floods with around 200 Black-heads but only half a dozen Herrings and a single Common Gull. There was also a nice, if mobile, flock of Lapwings.


The only other bird of note was a Grey Wagtail on Langlands…


The apple trees by the waterworks have now been virtually stripped of fruit but were still attracting  Fieldfares up to a couple of days ago…


The floods had receded significantly this morning…


But a walk in the Magic Garden turned up Kingfisher, Siskin, my first Treecreepers (two) since last summer…


And half a dozen Goldcrests in a large tit flock…