28th February 2021

Spring has definitely felt just around the corner this weekend with my first butterfly, a Small Tortoiseshell, and early signs of migration with a cracking skein of 113 Pinkfooted Geese flying north…

A skein of 113 were noted flying over just north of York earlier in the morning so I assumed it would be the same birds but the distance and timings would indicate an average speed of 16 mph which is very low for migrating geese so may just be a coincidence.

These birds were high, and noisy, enough that both Chris in Thrintoft and Andy in Scruton also picked them up. Chris also had 20 Whoopers north along the river.

Elsewhere it was the floods in the village fields which were the focus of the best sightings. Pick of these were seven Gadwall on the Bottom Fields in Ainderby on the 25th.

This was The largest flock I have ever seen in the parish. The next day this had risen to ten and on the 27^th, despite the floods receding significantly, there were 15.

Considering I have only seen Gadwall on half a dozen occasions in all the years I have lived here it does imply birds are regularly passing over but not usually landing.  

Other sightings since my last post include a Peregrine terrifying the Lapwings on Langlands, 130 Curlew and 120 Golden Plover on the floods, my first Redpoll and Coot for the year and this rather striking leucistic Fieldfare. A very poor picture but a definite heart stopper when you’re scanning through the thrush flocks!!

Parish year list to end of Feb: 75 species

The Big One...

One of the few upsides of lockdown has been the chance to look out over the garden whilst working. I haven’t seen much to be honest (although the first village Marsh Harrier since the war was a bonus last autumn) but that all changed on Wednesday.

The cold weather and putting out food had brought really good numbers of birds to the garden. At the back of the crab apple tree I noticed one small, active bird which then hopped into sight. It was an obvious phylloscopus warbler but unlike the occasional wintering Chiffchaffs we get in the garden this was a noticeably dark, drab brown bird. There was no sign of green or yellow and then I saw the head pattern: A striking well-defined whitish supercilium, emphasised by a dark line through the eye,  ****! DUSKY WARBLER!!

This was all with the naked eye but I had binoculars close at hand and was able to confirm the ID including seeing the shortish wings (which the bird flicked regularly), pinkish brown legs and a relatively fine Chiffchaff like bill. It was also noticeable that the pale throat and upper chest contrasted quite strongly with the rest of the underparts (in fact this was what I first noticed about the bird when it was partly obscured) but I don’t recall hearing this as a particular feature of Dusky.

The only frustration, and a major one, was when I returned from fetching my camera there was no sign of the bird and despite searching in potential areas over the subsequent days no further sightings.  

This will be the first record for North-west Yorkshire and, unsurprisingly, easily the best bird I have seen in the village in more than thirty years of watching.   

Otherwise it has been a quiet week. A walk along the river yesterday produced two Buzzard, five Snipe, three Oystercatchers and a Redshank...

A Sparrowhawk was hunkered down on the riverbank and there were at least four Cormorants including this one which, unusually, didn’t immediately fly away when it saw me…

And as there was so little to photograph this week I’ll finish with this winter-lit Wren from the garden…