Local patch lockdown 1: bird watching

We've been confined close  to home for nearly two weeks now, and with the Coronavirus lockdown in place we only leave home very early in the morning, when no one is around, for the regulation exercise walk. At that time of day we see very few people and we all pass one another at a safe distance, with just a cheery greeting.

We are fortunate because there is a network of footpaths and lanes on the edge of our little market town, that start just a couple of hundred yards from our front door.

Some of the lanes like this one, known locally as the Mile Lonnen, have old hedgerows and trees but large areas of land here were opencast coal mined about 25 years ago, and have slowly been recovering. When the mining finished they restored field boundaries with miles of new hedges and dry stone walls and planted shelter belts of trees that are now well developed and form wildlife corridors. They also left a large pond.

Walking the same route every morning has a great deal to recommend it, because you soon get to notice small changes, especially at this time of year when spring is gathering pace.  

One of the delights has been the realisation that there is so much bird life in these edgelands, close to home. So here is a photographic record of sightings in the first week of lockdown.

Blue tit in a larch plantation

Bullfinch feeding on cherry plum flower buds

Soaring buzzards, above a conifer plantation that is a probably their nest site

Chaffinch

Curlews, that feed in the fields here on their way to nest sites on fellsides in Weardale

Goldfinch

Great tit

Heron

House sparrow

Tree sparrow

Some fine aerial displays by lapwings

Robin in full song

Skylarks making song flights soon after sunrise

Song thrush

More willow warblers arriving every day

Counted six pairs of  yellowhammers. The combination of hedges, broad road verges and pastures suits them well

Numerous dunnocks, aka hedge sparrows

Rooks feeding on leatherjackets (cranefly larvae) in the pastures 

Jackdaws on a farmhouse chimney pot

Also seen but not photographed: sparrowhawk, magpie,carrion crow, starlings, coal tit