Posts about birding
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Garden first: Redwing
The garden is alive with birds at the moment, and in addition to some of the regulars I just today spotted a Redwing in the birch trees.
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Black-necked Grebe
There was a Black-necked Grebe at Fairhaven lake. We went, we saw, we didn’t blog about it until nearly a month later and don’t have much to say on
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Marshside odds and sods
A few firsts for me at Marshside.
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Gull and Skua Show
A ‘Sand Dune Safari’ event was repurposed as a bit of birdwatching when I was the only customer to show up. A bit of time with John Dempsey is always educational and this was no exceptions.
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Sabine's Gull at Pennington Flash
The long-staying Sabine’s Gull at Pennington Flash was among the first three birds I saw when I raised my binoculars to my eyes. Talk about an easy tick! The bird was sculling around near the assembled twitchers and ‘togs, making the occasional short flight before returning to the stage.
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Trip up North
A little getaway somwhat up North brought me a few firsts.
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Ring-billed Gull at Preston Dock
With no birds present at Marshside either when I unlocked the hides in the morning or at the end of the day, it’s a good job there was a nearby twitch available. A “1stS/2ndW” Ring-billed Gull had been reported yesterday, and another report at 8am was enough to send me in that direction as soon as I had other obligations discharged.
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First Cuckoo of Autumn
A trip to Martin Mere today brought my first Cuckoo sighting since the 1980s, which will therefore show up below as a life tick, and it felt like one. We saw the bird first from the Ron Barker hide at great distance, and subsequently much closer from the UU hide. Lovely views of this juvenile bird, but somebody else got much better pictures with the same camera so I need to look into settings for getting crisper images!
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Garden update
The first big tit flock in a while passed through, and I became aware that some of the species aren’t on my garden list yet. I was called away befores eeing if anything else was with them.
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Wood Sandpiper for reals!
I was in the area delivering cabbages anyway, so popped in to Marshside for a bit. 46 Black-tailed Godwits and a couple of ruff were hanging out on Rainford’s, with more Ruff in front of Sandgrounder’s as well as a few other seasonal birds.
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