Another Week Gone

I haven't posted for ages because, well I haven't had a great deal to post about! The weather has been awful, cold wet and windy, and I have been mainly on the feeding station treadmill and carrying out site visits to keep the wolf from the door!

On a cold wet, windy day about a week ago I was working on a farm out on the Fylde photographing grassland, watercourses and hedgerows and struggled to see much because of the frequent heavy down pours and 25 mph northwesterly wind. However I did have a couple of Buzzards struggling against the wind and a flock of fifteen Fieldfares using the cover of a hedge to move along out of the wind. On the same farm on some wet grassland was a flock of 86 Lapwings and 21 Curlews.

A ringing session last week at the reedbeds added another 16 Pied Wagtails to the ringing total, bringing it to somewhere near sixty now for this pre-roost site. As usual we were serenaded by Cetti's Warbler, but there was no sign of the Bearded Tits.

As stated previously my farmland bird feeding station has been keeping me busy, but every time I have gone of late it has been appalling weather and I haven't been able to have a proper look to see what has been there. There has been up to 36 Tree Sparrows, three Yellowhammers, ten Long-tailed Tits, half a dozen Blackbirds, four Song Thrushes and a few Reed Buntings.

However, there won't be many Thrushes now because all of the hedges have been cut and of course this has removed all the berries! Sadly I have had to call 'time' on this particular feeding station because of a  combination of factors such as greater use of the area where I feed for farming activities (it is a farm of course!) and this past week flooding and nowhere to put the seed down.

So I have started going through all my client files and looking over maps to find a suitable alternative location, where hopefully I can continue to support and ring farmland birds such as Tree Sparrows and Yellowhammers. I am hopeful that within a couple of weeks I will be up and running at a new site!