a rare twitch for me today, and as i was over in Sunderland anyway, it would have been rude not to go & see the Red Flanked Bluetail at Souter Bird Observatory, Whitburn.
Great shot from Steve.H - he must have a good lens to get a close-up shot like that ;-)
Nice to catch up with familiar & not so familiar faces & great craic with the lads ringing & processing the birds, many thanks to them for their hard work & determined efforts.
We watched one net shudder, it held a Woodcock, i ran up to get the guys & they ran back down to get the bird, the third one ringed there.
Only just started to see the odd 1 locally over the last week or so.
superb camouflage, but not very effective in this scenario....
Birds going over included Bramblings, Sparrowhawks, Crossbill, Siskin, Fieldfare, Redwing & stack of Blackbirds.
Also in the net were 3 Yellow browed Warblers :-
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| Bluetail twitch..... |
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& at least 6 Short-eared Owls "in-off"..... hopefully i can see one close to home before too long.
A nice day out & a refreshing change birding north of the Wear.
The other day I was in Sunderland park when I heard 2 possibly 4 little birds ' squeaking' in a Yew tree . At first I thought that they were maybe Fire/Goldcrests but they had a very prominent yellow stripe across the eye. Do you think they could have been Yellow Browed Warblers? I've never seen them here before and haven't seen them since.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought there was a good chance they were YBW's - there seems to be a decent number of them right down the Eastern side of the country.
ReplyDeleteThank you, I'll keep an eye out for them .
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