Showing posts with label Pied Wagtail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pied Wagtail. Show all posts

Friday, April 10, 2020

Local patch lockdown 2: more birds

The end of another week of coronavirus lockdown early morning exercise walks, and still seeing new birds very close to home.












The best sighting was this pair of partridges - red-listed birds. They look like they are nesting in the hedge on the edge of a pasture (that was part of an opencast coal mine 25 years ago)

















This pair of magpies are always in a pasture on part of a small holding




















Surprised to see this reed bunting in a roadside hedge. It was about a mile from a large pond and reed bed, created as mitigation for the coal mining, where it might be nesting.















There are small rookeries nearby, so they are always searching for small soil animals in the pastures






















Carrion crow repairing an old nest in an ash tree




















Greeted every morning by the song of chaffinches




















Coal tits are always in the trees close to small larch and pine plantations, which were established after opencast coal mining ended here. 

















Curlew in a sheep pasture. Listening to their call is a lovely way to begin the day.















Lapwing aerial courtship displays are over now. Most will have nests with eggs.
















Soon after sunrise on sunny mornings the air is always full of the song of skylarks, but they also sing on the ground.
















Pied wagtail on a farmyard muck heap - a profitable feeding site for a bird that hunts flies

























The glorious sound of a song thrush





















And the song of a wren - a lot of noise for such a small bird 

Friday, December 25, 2009

Christmas Dinner in a Bun



A combination of cabin fever, after too many days of snow, and a burning desire to break the mould of our typical Christmas led us to take our Christmas dinner in picnic form today, on the seafront at Tynemouth. And mighty fine it was too; glorious sunshine for a post-picnic walk along to North Shields fish quay and back. Two of the beneficiaries of our alfresco Christmas dinner were this black-headed gull............




...and this feral pigeon - both fine specimens of nature's waste disposal units.



The walk to North Shields yielded this handsome curlew...and......



... numerous oystercatchers whose beaks almost glowed in the low-angle winter sunshine and which....



....hopped with great aplomb from rock to rock, plus........



.... this crow that had found its own Christmas dinner that it had to defend against some pretty fierce-looking...






...great black-backed gulls..... while, also in black-and-white, up at the fish quay we came across this....



... grubby-looking pied wagtail, looking for scraps, and a...



... drake eider swimming .........



amongst the trawlers that were in harbour for Christmas. Then, on the way back we passed .....




... turnstones, that seemed to have added de-icing grit to their diet, and ....



... this very smartly turned-out redshank, complete with leg ring. But, best of all, there were scores of these wonderful...





... golden plovers, whose feather edges literally glowed golden in the afternoon sunlight. In about three and a half months I'll be listening to their plaintive calls as they begin to arrive back on their breeding grounds on Chapel Fell in Weardale.

A Christmas day to remember.

Merry Christmas to all........