Hard earned luck

Let's face it - birding is basically down to luck. It's just that the harder you work at it, the luckier you get :-)

Eurasian siskin (photo: Allan Hopkins)

At this time of year in particular it's helpful to remember that you're unlikely to pick up many new bird sightings unless you actually remember to leave the house.

Thursday was a case in point. With hail and snow lashing the office I was loathe to venture out on my usual lunchtime stroll, but mindful that I hadn't been down to the lake for a fortnight or so I togged up and trudged out.

At first there was precious little reward for a faceful of ice. A lone little grebe and two mallard suffered out on the water, watched by 9 cormorants in their usual tree.

But as I turned for the return trip, the wind now mercifully on my back, the sudden woosh of a small flock of small birds caught my attention. Creeping closer to the river bank I was delighted to lock on to a flock of perhaps 30 siskin, all feeding busily in the alder trees. 

This tiny, mobile and (in the male at least) colourful little finch with the distinct forked tail has been one of my missing winter regulars, so it really felt like this little flock had kickstarted my birding year again after such a slow start.

Reward for a faceful of ice after all.

Bird of the day: Siskin (Carduelis spinus), a winter visitor to these parts, best searched for in waterside alder trees and garden nut feeders (I seem to recall that red is considered the best colour, for some reason). 

All change - the new office patch

My office patch has long formed a small but important part of my birdwatching life, and for more than a decade that patch has been in and around the small market town of Henley-in-Arden.

With plenty of fields, some shrubby woods, a small stream and a canal all just a lunchtime stroll away, my Henley office patch has turned up plenty of memorable moments over the years - my best cuckoo encounter, mandarin duck and little egret, and - rarest of all - my only county wood warbler.

So it was with some trepidation that I joined my colleagues in an office relocation in 2013. The tiny hamlet of Langley is less than 10 miles from Henley, and undoubtedly the shiny new offices are good for business - but what would it do for my lunchtime birding?

Well the good news is that there is plenty of potential.

The office is surrounded on all sides by farmland, mainly for sheep and cattle so certainly no shortage of jackdaws. Half way along the track is a large, almost hidden lake, fed by a small stream and surrounded by trees. This of course brings an entirely new dimension to things. And high on the hills either side of the valley is mature woodland.

Today showed just what a rewarding mix that can all be.

At the lake I found 11 greylag, a little grebe, a moorhen, a grey heron and a calling kingfisher somewhere nearby. Six cormorants jostled for perch points on a single tree in the island, watched by just a single female mallard. She wasn't alone for long though, joined in short order by a total of 29 incomers.

As I moved into the main farmland, the most obvious feature was the number of pheasants on show. Clearly a local pen had been emptied in the last day or two - every field was literally lined with pheasants. Above and around them were the usual wood pigeons and jackdaws, with carrion crows and a few rooks among them.

A buzzard called loudly from nearby woods, a female kestrel gave great views while sitting on a wire, but it was the hedgerows that shone brightest: whether in ones or twos or in small flocks, I found just about everything I could have reasonably expected: blue tit, great tit, long-tailed tit, chaffinch, goldfinch and, slightly less common, coal tit, marsh tit, goldcrest and yellowhammer - the latter being the sight of two fantastic cock birds sitting high in a hedge and ignoring the increasingly wet and windy weather.

And when you add the other species picked up here and there along the way - the magpies, robins, wrens, blackbirds and pied wagtails to be precise - you have a very satisfying 30 species. Not at all bad for a 40 minute lunchtime stroll from the office.

Bird of the day: Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella): the stridently yellow male yellowhammer is as stunning a bird as you could wish to see, as the photo from www.andymorffew.com shows. A real farmland classic which is unfailingly generous to birdwatchers - as well as being almost luminous yellow it likes to sit high atop hedgerows, and it has one of the most distinctive and diagnostic calls you could wish for. Mind you, the females on the other hand...

Wild is the wind

The week started breezy and squally; by Tuesday we were seeing the tail end of Hurricane Gonzalo.

A showery Monday stroll around the Langley office turned up three new visitors - cormorants high in a tree near the lake. A kingfisher flashed by, and not far away I found a field full of skylarks.

The next day's lunchtime stroll from the Radford Semele office was carried out in the teeth of Gonzalo.

This made most sightings fleeting at best, as the birds either hunkered down or belted past with the wind at their tail. The biggest birds were, of course, easiest to see and ID - a grey heron disturbed near the pond, a buzzard on the return track, a sparrowhawk flashing low over the house.

A goldfinch struggled overhead near the highest point of the hill, but a small flock of finches flitting in and out of stubble fields proved harder to identify - my best guess is a mix of juvenile and female yellowhammer, pale and washed out in the poor light.

And talking of difficult ID, I was pleased to read in Birdwatching magazine this month the trials of birders trying to ID a particularly pale and grey buzzard in and around the Staffs / Leics border region - variously called as either an osprey or a rough-legged buzzard. Having had a virtually identical wobbly ID moment with a buzzard only couple of weeks ago (see here), it was nice to see that I'm not the only one to be fooled by the hugely variable plumage of Buteo buteo.

There was, however, no mistaking the one I saw on the Fosse Way on the following day: for a moment I thought I would hit it as it struggled to gain height from the verge. Fortunately it cleared the top of my car in time, and a long scaly tail hanging beneath confirming a freshly-caught rat as the reason for this unusual struggle for altitude.

Bird of the week: Cormorant  (Phalacrocorax carbo), once very much a bird of shore and sea, now a regular sight at lakes and rivers around the UK, particularly as autumn arrives.