Wednesday 9 March 2016

After the deluge...

Hello

Like many of us today, Chris Payne spent time at home at Greens Norton watching soaked birds coming to garden feeders. He was surprised to count a good twenty Lesser Redpolls as well as more regular species.

After much of the heavy rain and wind had passed by early afternoon, leaving floods in its wake, Eleanor was out at Newlands north of Walgrave village and saw four Grey Partridges. I was up at Harrington Airfield this afternoon in sodden fields and noted just five Golden Plovers, and a solitary Siskin was all I could summon at Sunderland Wood.

The heavy rain and strong winds made a spectacle at Pitsford Reservoir this afternoon with a cascade of water rushing down the dam overflow, and of course flooding the fields below.

The gull roost at Pitsford Res traditionally attracts up to about 1500 Common Gulls during the winter months, and with the recent addition of a feeding cage for the gulls they sometimes come quite close.

The pre-roost gathering of gulls there this afternoon included two neat adult Kittiwakes which later could be heard calling to each other, not a common sound in land-locked Northamptonshire! These birds remained for the roost and a third adult arrived later and plonked itself down in a different part of the roost, seemingly unaware that two of it's kin were only a few hundred metres away amongst the mass of Black-headed and Common Gulls.

Regards

Neil M



Common Gull

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