Summary : January 2015
New Species added to 2015 Year List in January= 82
Running Total for the 2015 UK So Far = 82
New UK Life List Birds In January = 0
Our Garden
The weather is very mixed. There have been some very light snow falls and some very cold days but the bird bath has seldom been frozen more than three mornings in a row so there has been no prolonged cold spell, although there were a couple of days at the end of the month where it snowed quite heavily. This soon disappeared though – at least in the suburbs.
The garden continues to have large numbers of Blackbirds – sometimes up to five at a time. The odd Woodpigeon and Collared Dove appear but the whole place is dominated by Starlings that seem to eat all available food (except oat flakes) instantly. A Coal Tit comes regularly and there are at least five Blue Tits constantly eating. Conversely Great Tits are very hard to see. A Wren is seen fairly often but not Dunnocks which seems odd. A Robin visits occasionally and has even mastered the Sunflower seed feeder – sort of.
We have a regular four or five Goldfinch and we even had a pair of Greenfinch one day.
I cleaned out the camera bird box and smoothed of the aperture because I thought its roughness might be putting off birds from it. I also removed the nesting material because I read somewhere that not all birds like to have it provided. I even toyed with the idea of wood chippings in the bottom until I read that only Woodpeckers and other birds that excavate their own holes expect to find that; other birds may be suspicious !
On the 25th January we did the Big Garden Bird Watch which gave us Collared Dove, Magpie, Coal Tit, Blue Tit, Wren, Robin, Blackbird and Goldfinch but true to form they hide when they know you are counting them.
Birding Days Out
We missed the first birding group day out to Wigan Flashes on the 6th of January as a result of post Christmas malaise but we had recovered for the second trip to Pennington Flash on the 13th which gave us a good, if unremarkable, start to our 2015 bird list. Pennington is always good foe species numbers.
The third birding group day was a trip to various destinations on the Wirral for a high tide on the 20th January . This saw us going first to Hoylake where the numbers were low but reasonably satisfactory and we saw the breeding plumage Grey Plover again as well as smallish numbers of Dunlin and Knot. From there we went on to New Brighton where at least some of us got brief views of a pair of Purple Sandpipers roosting on the pontoon in the Marine Lake.
It was still just after lunch time so we thought it worth a visit to Burton Mere Wetlands reserve on our way back but the various pools and ponds were all frozen over. This meant that there were few ducks around and nothing in the fields. The frozen conditions did draw out the Water Rails and we got two of them from two different hides. We also got views of a nice flock of Redwing.
One of the sites I had been reading about that I had hoped to fit in to the birding group day out on the 20th was to Shotwick Boating Lake . On that occasion it didn’t work out but we decided to give it a try on the 24th before going to Heswall Our trip turned out to be quite a success and although we did not see the Black-necked Grebes we had hoped for we did get four species of Swan in the same field, Whooper, Bewick’s, Mute and Black !
This was just a quick recce trip we fitted in before a planned visit to Heswall for the high tide (9.9metres at 1.45pm) where there was a Wirral ranger-led high-tide watch at the end of to Riverbank Road . This was a static watch and we all stood in the (fairly big) car park right on the edge of the marsh. There were some nice views of Merlin and Peregrine as well as a Kestrel hovering for five minutes just a few feet from our heads. By far the big event, however, was the totally unexpected and unlikely appearance of a Red-throated Diver in a gutter just a hundred yards in front of us. No need even for bins it was that close; it also dwarfed all the other birds around it looking like a giant among dwarves.
We still had a little time after this so we headed up to New Brighton Marine Lake where we added Purple Sandpiper and Turnstone to our list for the day. Of, course we had a bacon sandwich on toasted granary bread and a lovely cup of tea. This is almost as good a reason for going there as the birds !
The last birding group visit of the month was to Tatton Park where we were a little started to see a great deal of tree felling had been going on. The noise and activity had obviously scared a lot of birds away but further on we got nice views of Goldcrest and Treecreeper and Nuthatch. The high points were a small group of Ruddy Ducks on Melchet Mere and a mixed flock of Fieldfare, Redwing and Starlings up the hill from the edge of Tatton Mere in the field beyon. the high fencing.
Summary
A total of 82 species for the month with best of the bunch being Red-throated Diver, four species of Swan at the one time, Purple Sandpipers and some nice winter thrushes. While the weather was very mixed we had some nice clear days among the rainy ones and a blast of snow for a couple of days at the end of the month. Temperatures were quite variable and the lack or presence of wind was the determining factor in how cold it felt on any given day.