Saturday 28 April 2012

Greenshank twitch.

Elis and I were catching up with a little paperwork that was getting behind, the car was in for service, so we thought we'd be staying in the warm and dry today. That was until the message from Simon alerted us to the presence of a Bar-tailed Godwit at HESC. Scrounging a lift from my father we sped to the site, but a message received en route declared that the birds was in fact a Common Greenshank. Undeterred, (we haven't seen one this year and it is a wader after all) we carried on.

On arrival we met local birder Rob Norris and passed Simon Nicholls who was just leaving the site having re-identified the bird.
Greenshank
The bird was in summer plumage and feeding on the bund, it showed reasonbly well although it didn't come very close. Other waders there were Eurasian Oystercatcher, Common Sandpiper, Little Ringed Plover and Northern Lapwing.
Greenshank (centre), Common Sandpiper (left)
and Great Crested Grebe (front right).
There were some other migrants seen and heard too, Yellow Wagtail was on the bund and both Sedge and Reed Warblers were singing as was a resident Cetti's Warbler and the usual Blackcap, Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff. Over the water there were several hirundines of all three common species and a Common Tern. As we left a Common Swift flew over the car park.
Swallows and Sand Martins resting on the bund.

Two more migrants and a 40 quid fine!

Elis and I were just passing Willen when she decided to check the mobile for messages and found a message from Simon Nichols saying that there were 3 Black Terns at Willen South lake. So we stopped by.
Black Tern
It was raining quite hard but we made our way to the lakeside and sure enough, there were the terns, and flying above us we saw two Common Swifts. (Aparently there had been five there earlier.)
As the weather was so rotten Elis didn`t get much satisfaction photo wise, but Elis caught one bird perched on a bouy and another resting on the boardwalk with a Common Tern. The light was too dreadful to get any decent action shots in flight; the swifts got away!
Black and Common Tern

Common Tern
When we got back to our car we saw a bloke putting a ticket on it... note to self - remember to carry change in the car!

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Welcome to the new-look site.

Hello.

Welcome to the redesigned Rick Simpson Birding blog and website, We hope you like the new look. We hope too that finding your favourite features will be easier with the new format. The page titles speak for themselves, so feel free to have a browse and see what interests you. As usual the pages are liberally decorated with Elis' photos and my thoughts and comments, sometimes serious, sometimes not so serious.

If you want to see a blog from the previous site don't worry, they are all available on the Previous Blogs page by clicking on the link on the page. In the same way the downloadable Checklist and Annotated list for Ubatuba and other sites will soon be available on the Bird Lists page (under construction).

The new style site has a 'comments' facility and we would be happy to hear what you have to say and what you think of the site and its features.

As we said, there are some pages still under construction that will be coming on-line soon (if we can stay out of the field long enough to do them) and some of the pages that are already published will be reviewed and improved as we go along. The Wader Quest Update page will be added to as we have clocked up any new waders or whenever we have a trip somewhere.

We hope you enjoy visiting our site.
Cheers. Rick and Elis.