Oh No Not Tower Lodge Again!

My third visit here in under three weeks, but you just have to keep plugging away, in birding you have to remember the 'you never know' principal and keep in touch with these excellent areas, in any case I had an appointment to meet up at 8.30am at Tower Lodge with a front line/high profile Fylde birder and I don't make appointments with anyone which I can't keep.

Leaving Tower Lodge we walked east to beyond Trough Bridge to take the back side of the woodlands on the south side of the Trough Road west to Marshaw to take a track north with Sawpit and Pennington Woods on our left, then east again to take the back side of Tower Plantation which is to the north above Tower Lodge, before turning west to the plantation strip behind Tower Lodge to return to our cars....A full eight hours and five miles of footwork.

Spotted Flycatcher Marc Heath  

Brief views of 2 Cuckoo in flight, with good views of one later perched and calling, and a suspicion that there are three in the area with a bird/birds calling on and off for the full eight hours, alternatively two birds very mobile and very far ranging. A pair of Curlew with a young bird was an excellent sight, 7 Spotted Flycatcher, 5 Redstart, 5 Mistle Thrush, a Common Sandpiper and Dipper, Grey Wagtail, Treecreeper, Nuthatch, Song Thrush....

Siskin Noushka Dufort

....and a smart male Siskin gave brief views taking a drink in the stream. Raptors were represented by 2 Buzzard, a Peregrine Falcon, and a Kestrel.

Pied Flycatcher. Howard Stockdale.

A male Pied Flycatcher still sings to itself - as far as I can see - in the small wooded area to the west of Tower Lodge and looks set to depart the area with a no score before the month is out.

Notable that no good numbers of birds or species seen here today, and again some species expected were not found. Surely an area like this holds - or should hold - good numbers of Redpoll and Siskin for example. But I've spent at least 16 hours in this area in my three recent visits here and according to my observations these birds are not to be found, and 15 Crossbill reported on 21 May have almost certainly moved on. Nevertheless well worth the effort and something I'll be doing all over again the first chance I get....its good to be alive and birding!

It was also good to see Martin and Andy this afternoon, and sorry about the 'Bluebirds' BD but you're just going to have to get used to them I'm afraid!

Thanks again to Marc/Noushka/Howard for the excellent photography....Even my map looks good if you 'clik the pik'.

Land Of No Return.

Although mere speculation, it is now generally accepted that warming of the climate will allow the sedentary population of the European Stonechat in the future to increase to such an extent that they become entirely resident in the UK. I have surveyed at least six upland locations this spring/early summer and see no signs of this happening any time soon, and have found no evidence of the migrant population increasing numbers based on my observations....quite the opposite in fact. 

I was up to Newby Moor yesterday morning - another former stronghold of the Stonechat - and back in 1999 the very place I first began to notice sightings were becoming more regular of this species than ever before, and Newby Moor was to become the holder of one of the best winter records - from numerous upland locations I cover - when I found 11 Stonechat there on 12 February 2008, though the Cross Of Greet area beat that record when I found 12 Stonechat there later the same day. Hard to believe I could find 23 Stonechat on the same cold winters day whilst this year I struggled to find just 2 birds from six upland locations visited so far in much better weather conditions this spring than in February 2008. This was my first visit to Newby Moor since 12 May 2011 when I got the same nil result as I did yesterday. The last breeding record I have from here was on 28 May 2009.

Linnet Richard Pegler

I don't usually do birding in halves, today was no exception and I gave the area a good four hours looking over to note at least 18 Meadow Pipit, 6 Willow Warbler, 3 Sedge Warbler, 2 Sand Martin, a Linnet, and a Brown Hare. In the Clapham Station area and the River Wenning, a Spotted Flycatcher, Garden Warbler, Blackcap, Grey Wagtail, and 2 House Martin.

A meeting at 2.00pm had been arranged at Barbondale so off I went. It was established that two pairs of Pied Flycatcher are breeding here this year, though sightings were only one male and a female, something of a disappointment compared to the excellent records of 2012 here.

Tawny Owl Richard Pegler

Also of note at Barbondale, 5 Redstart, 2 Tree Pipit, 2 Wheatear, a Spotted Flycatcher, Nuthatch, and a Tawny Owl calling.

Thanks Richard for the Linnet and the Tawny Owl which is particularly brilliant with a 'clik on the pik' ....Excellent.   

Licensed To Kill.

But to start with, a stunning image....

Black Kite Noushka Dufort  

....of the Black Kite in flight through the woods. A stunning raptor which had the distinction of almost being at the top of the 'not accepted' list with the BBRC until it was removed from the rarities list in 2005. The first County of Lancashire record of the Black Kite was made in the Dunsop Valley in Bowland in April 1989, another bird - a flyover - was at Aldcliffe Marsh in June 1999....Excellent Noushka, Thank You.

Buzzards Again.

OK....so I've nothing better to do but to post a couple of images and put three pretty straight forward and uncomplicated question before you which I already put before myself.

Is it ever right to kill a protected bird of prey (or destroy its nests) to protect a surplus of non-native birds bred purely for the 'sport' of shooting.

Shouldn't the public have been consulted out in the open on this kind of decision, as opposed to it being made privately in some shady corner. 

How are these people - note no names this time - who think they have such power in their hands, going to deal with other such connected issues concerning birds of prey and other wildlife....Well we will have to wait and see won't we.

And to end with....

Montagu's Harrier Marc Heath

There's no evidence of the Montagu's Harrier ever having bred in Lancashire, but as a bit of an irony, a female was shot in the Whitendale Valley in Bowland by a gamekeeper in 1889 - nothings changed - which was reported to have had a brood patch. Of the few reported in the county since the mid 1940's only a hand full have been fully documented and it is likely that a number of those related to the Hen Harrier. A male was reported at Leighton Moss in May 1969, followed by a bird at Carnforth Marsh 11 years later in May 1980.

Thanks for your image of the 'ring tail' Marc, I'm very envious of your sightings of the Montagu's Harriers in Kent.  

I'D SOONER BE BIRDING!....and looking good for some this week.

Yesterday....

....all my troubles seemed so far away....Well, not too sure about that!

Photo. Pete Woodruff.

Hard to believe this photograph showing the east side of Hawthornthwaite Fell covered in mist, was taken in the afternoon on the same day - when I reckon the temperature dropped by several degrees in a matter of minutes - one hour earlier than....

Photo. Pete Woodruff.

....this one three miles away at Abbeystead, the date....31 May 2013.

Song Thrush Antonio Puigg  

Having received a good report from a reliable source of birds in the plantation below Catshaw Fell, I decided to go look for myself, but the birds I was looking for didn't show and I only connected with 3 Lesser Redpoll, a Song Thrush, Willow Warbler, Meadow Pipit, and noted about 6 Curlew around the foot of the fell.

At Cam Brow the Sand Martin have a small colony here again this year, though I didn't stop to do any counting birds/nest holes as the sun had brought out the 'picnickers' and a family were close to the bank. I hope the hordes to visit these areas throughout the coming weeks will leave the birds to safely go about their breeding activities.

So I decided to give the Marshaw - Trough Bridge area another look over but gained little to add to Wednesdays sightings save 5 Redstart being two more than the previous visit, as were 6 Mistle Thrush, and a Jay to add. I saw the male Pied Flycatcher still singing only to the trees according to my observations, a birder I spoke with claimed to have seen three males.

Sanderling. 

Sanderling. Howard Stockdale.

Howard kindly sent me this excellent image of one of the three Sanderling he saw on Plover Scar this week which reminded me to dig out my old records to retrieve the amazing count with John Leedal 16 years ago when JL himself estimated up to 10,000 Sanderling on Ainsdale Beach, North Merseyside, 24 May 1997. A number of this species I never expected to witness and haven't done so since. 

Thanks for the Sanderling Howard....Brilliant. And thanks Antonio for the excellent portrait of the Song Thrush....'Clik the pik' for a bit of photographic excellence.   

Up And Down Again.

I was up to Bowland yesterday morning, and down to the coast in the afternoon....What a truly brilliant area we live in, upland birding in the morning, and coastal birding 30 minutes later in the afternoon.

I was off to a good start yesterday and was at Marshaw by 8.15am and collected some nice rewards for the four hours I put in between Marshaw and Trough Bridge.

Spotted Flycatcher. Copy Permitted.

The bird in the image above was at Bank End today, and it was good to find 5 Spotted Flycatcher had found their way back to the Tower Lodge area again this year....I probably missed another five. 

Pied Flycatcher Paul Foster

A singing male Pied Flycatcher was at Tower Lodge where I found two on 17 May, I've had no personal evidence of any females in the area. Also of note, a Cuckoo heard several times, 2 Redstart both singing males, 2 Common Sandpiper, 2 Dipper, 3 Treecreeper, 4 Mistle Thrush, 4 Willow Warbler, a male Siskin, and a healthy population of at least 12 Grey Wagtail including a young bird being fed. 

At Conder Green where I visited nowhere beyond the viewing platform and saw the female Scaup, a distant Common Sandpiper surprised me, viewed from the west end of the pool  and made me jump to attention for 2 seconds with the Temminck's Stint in mind, another surprise was a Little Ringed Plover, only my second sighting this year since my first two here on 2 April.

At Cockersands I had no time other than to check Plover Scar at high tide to count 455 Ringed Plover, and up to 100 Dunlin. I also checked Conder Pool and Cockersands today but little to add to yesterday with Plover Scar deserted to the extent that when a Peregrine Falcon flew over not a single wader came up off the scar. Nine Eider and a Whitethroat were to note.

Swallows.

Swallow. Pete Woodruff.

Of particular note at Cockersands today was the continuing late passage of Swallows with some House Martin in the mix. I reckon the Swallows were passing and heading north at the rate of 100 per hour in the three hours I was there today. I see this at best as 'very late, and not good'.   

Spring Butterflies.

This year lots of butterflies emerged weeks later than they normally do due to the spring having the coldest start for a half century, the month of March was the second coldest since records began, with snow on the ground in some areas into April.

 Grizzled Skipper Butterfly Conservation  

The typical delay for the emergence of rare spring butterflies was of two weeks, beyond the typical was the case of the Grizzled Skipper which emerged four weeks later than last year.

Duke of Burgundy Marc Heath  

This beautiful butterfly the Duke of Burgundy didn't emerge until late April, about three weeks later than last year, the Wood White which was first seen on 10 April in 2012 wasn't seen until almost a month later this year. But the late spring wasn't necessarily a bad thing for the butterflies as the host plants they rely upon will also have been delayed.

Last year was a complete washout for UK butterflies and the worst year on record for them, the majority of species having suffered declines. As I see it, and according to the forecast I just saw, things don't appear to be going to get any better, the weather needs to improve drastically, the butterflies need to be flying, mating, and laying eggs, a successful breeding season is needed to start to rebuild their populations.

Conder Green. Peter Guy. 

I found a good excuse to post this excellent photograph of the creeks at Conder Green, host to many a good bird in the past and I'm always on the lookout for the next one. The excuse being, the red building on the right is River Winds, often mentioned on Birds2blog usually referring to the House Martins which nest here every year, and which I mentioned in a recent post to record up to around ten birds having returned here once again. 

Temminck's Stint. Conder Pool. Copy Permitted.

And by the way....The Temminck's Stint turned up on Conder Pool again yesterday at 6.12pm but not seen since.

Thanks to Butterfly Conservation, Marc Heath, Peter Guy, and Copy Permitted for these excellent images. 

Please 'clik the pik' if you want to see them as they really should be seen. 

The Rossall Sanderling.

 Sanderling. Geoff Gradwell.

An excellent in flight shot of the Sanderling at Rossall Point. I don't recall ever seeing one as good as this image of a Sanderling in flight.

There are lots of birding bonuses, and I had one on Sunday 26 May at Rossall Point, Fleetwood, when I found one of my most favourite of waders the Sanderling bearing rings. But there's a challenge following a find like this, in that attempting to get an accurate reading from birds with rings is often impossible, usually because of the distance between you and the bird, but Sundays Sanderling was an easy one. 

Sanderling. Geoff Gradwell.

My bird wasn't quite as close as this one of which GG got an excellent shot, but once I got my binoculars onto it it was a pretty straight forward task to get the legs and sequence correct.

I duly got in touch with two contacts Chris over here, and Jeroen in The Netherlands - both of which co-operated and helped me with flying colours - and within 24 hours of the find I had recieved the history of this wonderful little creature which had been ringed - by an amazing coincidence - one day short on the day I found the bird exactly two years ago on 27 May 2011 at Sandgeroi in Iceland.

From the date of its first ringing this Sanderling was sighted on three occasions in 2011 at the same location of Sandgeroi, and twice in 2012 there, the last sighting on 19 May being a little over a year before I found this bird again on the beach at Rossall Point on Sunday 26 May 2013.

All this leaves you to wonder just how many miles this bird will have flown between its first ringing May 2011 in Iceland, to the find two years later May 2013 in Fleetwood, England.

Juvenile Sanderling. Jeroen Reneerkens.

Thanks to Jeroen at www.waderstudygroup.org for the image above, and to Geoff Gradwell for his two excellent images of the Sanderling.

Another Compromise....

Another compromise with KT on Sunday when it was suggested we paid a visit to Fleetwood to take a look round Freeport, but - said I - only if it also includes a look in on Rossall Point....and off we went. 

 Gannet David Cookson

Well, no birds at Freeport!....but when we got to Rossall Point a Gannet was soon seen far out to sea flying south, and a Whitethroat performed nicely for us around the bushes on the perimeter of the golf course.

 

Sanderling Brian Rafferty   

But the interest was on the beach at high tide when 14 Sanderling included the very interesting sight of one carrying rings, duly and appropriately submitted. The result of this could be quite exciting and the sort of thing which fires me up no end when it comes to my birds/birding. A call at Conder Green on the way home produced a female Scaup on Conder Pool. Hardly to be called a full days front line birding, but....good enough for me, and certainly much better than no birding at all.

Temminck's Stint. Copy Permitted.

This morning I responded to an alert of a Temminck's Stint at Conder Green, but an hour spent there searching didn't have a result. The bird had been seen around 8.10am and flew over Conder Pool, landed for 5 seconds on a mud bank in the creeks, then did a disappearing act. 

Thanks to DC/BR for the excellent photographs.

Unnatural England.

You may already be aware of this story once you have started to read it, if not, to be fully in the picture on what follows you might like to take a look at THIS first as this post is a follow on.

Buzzard. Gary Jones.

A historic precedent has been set by a government agency which has granted a license to secretly destroy the nests and eggs of Buzzards to protect a Pheasant shoot....No you've not just incorrectly read what I wrote. Raptors gained legal protection decades ago and this is the first time such action has been licensed against any bird of prey to protect a shoot....often referred to by those who engage in this kind of activity as 'sport'. 

Buzzards are recovering from near extinction, and now number something like 40,000 breeding pairs, whilst 35 million Pheasants are bred each year for shoots. The wildlife minister whose family estate runs shoots - no you've not just incorrectly read what I wrote - cancelled plans last year to spend £375,000 on the same exercise after a public outcry. The license recently granted was of course made by that wonderful government agency Natural England who handed out the permit to destroy Buzzard nests and any eggs they held. 

A spokesman for Natural England said....'the law allows action to be taken against protected species to protect livestock, which includes any animal kept for the provision or improvement of shooting'....People like this and those who employ them put the shits up me, and cause me to have sleepless nights in the name of wildlife. 

As always, a post like this from me could go on and on, but I'll shut up now and leave anyone who might look in on Birds2blog to make up their own minds about this worrying u-turn by Mr Benyon the 'Wildlife Minister' who of course isn't alone in condoning this kind of persecution of our birds/wildlife. But I reckon the vast majority of the population of this country would prefer to see the Buzzard soaring overhead in the sky, rather than knock its nest and eggs out of a tree with a long pole.

We can end on at least a piece of good news, that of the Freedom Of Information Act which is what was responsible for this news finding its way into the public domain following a successful application for it....Long live the Freedom Of Information Act. 

Thanks to Gary Jones for the image of the Buzzard, soaring over his head the day he took this photograph. Long may the Buzzard reign to soar over all our heads, and long may people like Gary reign too to take brilliant shots of birds/wildlife like this one. Also thanks to Noushka Dufort for the brilliant new header. 

I'D SOONER BE BIRDING....But probably won't until Tuesday next at the earliest. There's more to life than birds, said the man with a mental problem!

You Have To Work At It!

I think the pager service I was tuned into yesterday - as I am every day - said all that needed to be said about 'what's about' when, during the 16 hours mine was switched on, just three Lancashire messages were broadcast. 

But birding is OK, though you have to work at it....Well I work at it all the time, but if the birds aren't there no amount of 'work' is going to produce them, but yesterdays birding for me was OK! 

I decided to go to Cockersands first, apart from anything else I need to establish whether or not the Sanderling are going to turn up here this year en-route to their breeding grounds. Birds from both the Siberian and Nearctic breeding populations migrate through Britain, and 6 years ago on 31 May 2007 I observed an excellent number of 130 Sanderling on Plover Scar. This has never anything like happened since, but if it is ever going to happen here again, I want to be there when it does....but it didn't yesterday.

Whitethroat Phillip Tomkinson   

It was actually a bit thin a Cockersands with just 23 Ringed Plover and 7 Dunlin on Plover Scar, with 2 Eider off here. Five Whimbrel were at the caravan park end, and 3 Wheatear, 2 Whitethroat, 2 Tree Sparrow, and a Dunnock were of note. 

Little Ringed Plover Antonio Puigg

I then went on a mission to check out the River Lune upstream from Bull Beck to find 5 Little Ringed Plover....EXCELLENT....3 Common Sandpiper, and a Grey Wagtail.

Spotted Flycatcher Astland Photography  

I then went to Hornby to walk the River Wenning downstream, then upstream on the River Lune to Lloyne Bridge where I found my first Spotted Flycatcher of the year. I also heard 3 Blackcap males in good voice, 3 Common Sandpiper, a Goosander, Skylark. In excess of 100 Swift were over and around both rivers, with a 'few' Swallow, Sand Martin, and House Martin noted.

The weather whinge.   

I've left my weather whinge until the end, but on the headland at Cockersands yesterday the howler made it more like March than May, and there's little improvement today....Pathetic.