Cold Whetsted

 Whetsted GP 0600 - 1020 WNW wind varying f1 - f4-5, cool to cold, soetimes warm in the sun

A chilly walk with DH for four hours.....

The Ferruginous Duck was still present on the western most pit.....looking rather velvety brown in the occasional....very occasional....sunshine.....we were lucky enough to get good flight views as well...

Photo thanks to DH

On West Pit with the Ferrug Duck and Tufteds was one lone Pochard and one female Goldeneye.  Seems a bit late for them as the ones that had over wintered here have been gone two weeks....

I mentioned the other day about the more recent habitat destruction that had occured north of the pits probably last year, which i photographed.....but I forgot to get a photo of the area I had mentioned they did a couple of years ago which is now a monoculture wasteland with few birds on it, in fact I saw one bird on it today, 2 woodpigeons the other day....but this area below was covered with scrub and would usually hold Whitethroats and more migrating birds,....anyway....so here it is...

I dont know who owns the land, theres a pretty big land owner along the road a way that has a load of oast houses to its name, maybe them?.....but they havent done anything with this bit of land apart from cut the grass that i can see....there are a few other species gradually coming back in the sward but I dont hold out any hope....I can only guess that someone, without any knowledge or understandign of ecology, simply wanted to 'tidy it up'....as humans like to do.....what a waste....

Other than that....

At west pit a few Swallows turned up....then a few Sand Martin....then one House Martin....they were clearly slowly moving in from the south....after another ten minutes or so a steady flow had begun and each species had numbers present, flying low over the water.....great to see all three species arrving at the pits on the same day....

13 Nightingales

5 Lesser Whitethroat

8 Common Whitethroat

1 Reed Warbler

3 Cettis Warblers

1 Cuckoo