Day Out To WWT Martin Mere : 4th August 2011

Day Out To WWT Martin Mere : 4th August 2011

We drove up to Martin Mere to collect the new scope I had ordered but while we were there we had a look around the hides as well. The weather wasn’t brilliant and it had been raining heavily so the scrapes were under water and a lot of the birds had flown off for the day. We had hoped to see the Green Sandpipers that were on the sightings board and which the web site had indicated had been around for a couple of days so we walked down to the usually reliable Ron Barker Hide. From here, though, we didn’t see too much out of the ordinary. There were Lapwing and Shelduck and a single Black-tailed Godwit but no Green Sandpiper. We were thinking that we would take a look at the long hide overlooking The Mere but just as we were about to leave a chap told us he had just come from the  Hale Hide where he had seen four Green Sandpipers.

We duly headed off there but by the time we got there there were only two of them to be seen but we had great views of them in some good light and we had our tick – Our first Green Sandpipers ! These were probably non-breeding birds making an early autumn migration from Scandinavia to their wintering grounds in south Europe or Africa. This month has been a good Sandpiper summer for us having seen Wood, Common and now Green Sandpipers.

We walked down to the United Utilities hide looking for the Tawny Owl that is supposed to be roosting there but we didn’t see it – perhaps because of the rain. We looked briefly at the Harrier Hide and then went on to the Janet Keir hide. The feeders there were dominated, as usual, by Feral Pigeons and Collared Doves but there were a large number of Chaffinches, quite a few Greenfinches and a few Goldfinches. Anne also thought she had seen some of the Wrens, that we had seen previously, outside the hide. We then went on to the long hide but there was nothing much new there so we returned to the visitor centre before returning home. As we left we had a look again at the nesting Swallows just above the entrance door to the visitor centre.

The views we had of the Green Sandpiper were all the better by having a brand new scope – a Swarovski ATS-80 HD. I had bought this body with a 20-60x zoom eyepiece and a stay-on case for £2,230.00p but I had negotiated a £350 reduction by trading in my old Opticron ES80 ED Telescope & HDF 20 x 60  Zoom  eyepiece with a stay-on case and Opticron Scope to Nikon DSLR Adaptor so in the end I paid £1,921.00p. In fact the eye-piece probably wasn’t worth anything anyway as it seemed to have got either some dust or some humidity into the eyepiece that I couldn’t budge so I would have had to buy a new eye-piece anyway so I was happy with the exchange price I got and was more than happy with my new scope. Lighter and smaller and infinitely clearer !

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