Across the Parishes

I covered a few sites briefly today by means of a mixture of 'pre-work' feeding at Moss House Farm and then surveying various bits of farmland for work. My first port of call was Moss House to put some food out at our feeding station. The feed I put out a week ago had gone and the peanuts had gone down in the feeders so something has started to use the feeding station.

I wondered whether there was much vis on the coast today as I had a few Mipits, Skylark, Swallow and Chaffinch over. It really was a flying visit so other than a calling Great Spot that was it.

My next stop was up the Lune Valley on the Newton Hall Estate again to finish off a survey I started last week. Again there were a handful of Mipits, Skylark and Linnets going over, but not in any numbers. New in from last week was a Chiffchaff singing from some woodland and Buzzards had dropped to just 3 sightings. Presumably the 14 I had last week included some migrants. The only other birds just worth mentioning were two Great Spots and a couple of Song Thrush.

I now had to go back to the Fylde and do some survey work around Fluke Hall. On the way I stopped off at the Conder Pool and the only birds on it were 3 Little Grebes. There was very little on the creeks by the road and as I was working I didn't have time to walk over the bridge and look in the creeks there for any Greenshank of Spotshank.

Walking down to Ridge Farm I had a flock of 51 Tree Sparrows and 51 Lapwing were feeding in a potato field. In the same field as the Lapwing were a flock of 90 Linnets and 80 Goldfinch. Along the gorse hedge that divides this field in two I had 3 Whitethroats showing well in the warm sunshine.

Walking across the arable fields to the east of Fluke Hall I had a Green Sandpiper go over calling. I had bumped into Bob earlier and he had one on the pool at Fluke Hall, so there is a good chance that this was the same bird. As I headed east just behind the sea wall I had two flocks of 58 and 60 Pintail head north flying high. Quite an early date I thought for this number of Pintail, although you can get fairly large flocks on the Ribble in September. In fact I did wonder whether these were some birds from the Ribble based on their direction of flight.

I see there was a Blackburnian Warbler on St. Kilda, lucky bastards, so I thought I would end with a picture of a Blackburnian Warbler. This is in the Spring, so the St. Kilda bird wouldn't have looked like this, but nevertheless what a crippler!