Here comes the rain!

Hello

So far the weather change has meant cooler conditions and greyer skies but little in the way of rain...hopefully there is more of the wet stuff to come!

Scarcer birds noted at Stanford Reservoir today were made up of three Common Sandpipers, a Hobby, four Spotted Flycatchers, two Ravens, three Lesser Whitethroats and gatherings of Swallows and Goldfinches. Two Ospreys were noted at Hollowell Reservoir this evening.

Birds in the Scaldwell Bay at Pitsford Reservoir were mostly long-stayers such as two Red-crested Pochards, four Great White Egrets, a Common Sandpiper, three Green Sandpipers, an adult Yellow-legged Gull and the male Common Redstart still. New birds in were three Ruff and five Snipe and a Nuthatch at the Old Scaldwell Road Feeding Station which is rather unusual. A Common Sandpiper, a couple of migrant Sedge Warblers and two more Yellow-legged Gulls were at the dam end of the reservoir this afternoon.

At Harrington Airfield three Common Redstarts were heard calling with one at Bunker Two being seen and the other two calling from cover between the Chippings Compound and Bunker One.

A Peregrine was seen over Earls Barton village today and a Hobby and a couple of Spotted Flycatchers were in Hanging Houghton village. Clifford Hill Pits hosted a single Goldeneye and two Common Sandpipers and there was a Great White Egret on Higham Lakes (part of the Ditchford Pits complex).

A Wheatear is not often encountered on the Titchmarsh Reserve at Thrapston Pits so was a welcome sighting - there were also eight species of warbler on show on the reserve and a single Common Sandpiper too. A Hobby was at Summer Leys LNR prior to the onset of rain this evening and there were three Black-tailed Godwits and a Greenshank earlier in the day. A single Cattle Egret flew north over the Roadside Pit at Stanwick Pits this morning - a site that the local birders have been visiting daily and surely is now overdue a rarity or two (yesterday's Bittern aside)?

The young drake Ferruginous Duck was still at Daventry Country Park today plus the Pink-footed Goose and a Caspian Gull.

Regards

Neil M

Juvenile Green Woodpecker.

Gadwall with ducklings.

Lesser Black-backed Gulls - yep
all of them!