Sunday, 16 October 2016

16th October

The last mothing  of the season last night. The weather was much colder than forecast and resulted in only 27 moths being caught of just eight species. But this did include a new one for the parish, Feathered Thorn…


...and 11 examples of ‘November’ moths, there was some variation in these but they are very hard to distinguish the three very similar species and John has taken them for further analysis


As we emptied the traps this morning there was a large movement of Redwings over, all generally heading South-South-East, along with small numbers of Skylarks. This is in contrast to yesterday when it was almost exclusively Fieldfares, heading high west, presumably straight in from the coast.

Yesterday I flushed my second Woodcock of the year from the Magic Garden, a Buzzard has taken up almost permanent residence there…


And there was still the odd Chiffchaff hanging on (or passing through) the Garden. More remarkably Chris Knight spotted an exceptionally late Swift over the village on Wednesday. Given all the birds arriving from the east over the last few days it’s interesting to speculate where this bird originated from…

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