29th December

It’s been a big gap since I last wrote this blog, indicative of too little time and too few birds but given it’s almost the end of the year I need to make an effort. Fortunately this has coincided with a nice find. Yesterday evening I walked down to Langlands to look for a reported ‘rare’ owl which turned out to be only a Little Owl. But whilst looking for this I noticed large numbers of geese moving over from the east and apparently dropping in to roost near Greenhills farm.

So this afternoon I walked down Greenhills Lane. Little en route other than two Buzzards, a Bullfinch and a good sized flock of Long-tailed Tits…

But in the big open fields here there were high numbers of Greylag Geese

I counted around 400 birds and then a further flock of about 50 flew high in from the east and noisily joined the birds on the ground (doing an impression of a Peter Scott painting on the way)

Despite searching I couldn’t find any rarer species amongst them but in trying to get closer I flushed two Woodcock and then heard a vaguely familiar call, Raven! The bird flew across and seemed to be dropping towards the ruined farmhouse before I lost sight of it. This is the first record for the parish of what is still an exceptionally rare bird in the Vale of Mowbray. A fantastic, and timely, way to clock up my 100^th species of the year in the village.