Christine's walking & birds blog

Burnham Beeches

Greger's gone to Glasgow for a couple of days, so after ferrying him to the station I popped up to the woods for a quick walk. Greger had taken the P90 for site photos, so I charged up the old camcorder battery in case I saw anything good.

On this glum day, there was a huge mixed flock in Dorney Wood, consisting of blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits, nuthatch, treecreeper, great spotted woodpecker and last but not least, a lesser spotted woodpecker (fourth lesser-spot sighting of the year). A marsh tit was close by.

The lesser-spot was distant and I couldn't see if it was male or female. At this point I was distracted by a god-awful racket coming from Egypt Woods, which sounded like a green woodpecker being slowly strangled. When I looked back into Dorney, the birds had moved on.

As I returned to the car park, a flock of chaffinches containing a brambling led me into the Beeches and back into the tit flock. I relocated the lesser-spot and was trying to video it from a respectful distance when it flew straight towards me. It hopped along the branch above and then flew down, then away to the left when I lost it.

The footage was dark and really poor. In the end I paused it at the point where the woodpecker flew down, and took a photo of the computer screen.

A cold rain began to fall, and as I reluctantly set off for the car park two lesser redpolls were noted high in silver birches, a jay flew screeching through the trees and a tawny owl hooted. A delicious hour's birding!