Christine's walking & birds blog

Having been grounded for a week with a cold/flu, I ventured out for an early-evening walk. Two wheatears were on Monument Hill. Some reeds have been cut right back, but from those still standing a Cetti's warbler sang explosively.

Great dark clouds were massing in the sky to the south and there were several rumbles of thunder. In past years I'd wait to see if anything would be brought down ahead of the storm; a bunch of dunlins once memorably landed on a nearby island with the first raindrops.

But I must be getting old and feeble because I didn't want to be out in what was approaching. As it grew darker and darker I hurried back along the footpath, pausing for a while to watch a water rail foraging in the bittern's channel.

A flash of lightning followed immediately by a crash of thunder sent me scurrying to my car - which I reached as the heavens opened. It was quite exciting driving along Lake End Road, with puddles forming rapidly at the road-sides and the rain spearing down so hard you thought the windscreen must surely break.

A wader at Dorney Wetlands? Stagger sideways, reel back and fall over clutching head!

True, it's only a redshank - and probably the one already spotted in several locations. Still.....

The shelduck (sheldrake?) is one half of a pair.

Only an escape/feral bird of course, but this bar-headed goose brightened up the scene on the Jubilee River this evening.

It seemed ill-at-ease, associating with Canadas for a while before flying off upstream with three of them.

A walk in Egypt Woods brought larch trees full of siskins, with a few redpolls and a brambling. Several times I heard the dry-as-a-biscuit call of a crossbill.

In Burnham Beeches, a puddle had attracted five Mandarin drakes and two ducks. "There may be trouble ahead....."

There were a further two pairs in the moat and could well have been more - I didn't walk right round.

Sunday March 7th

Swinley Forest

I walked down through the forest to Wishmoor. Two crossbills were flying around together calling, and when they landed I clicked off a shot of the male. Not sure what he's doing but he could be displaying to the female.

Siskins and redpolls were also present.

Greger's cold has returned with a vengeance so there was no getting out west for us today. When I'd done the shopping I went for a walk up the woods and fell in with a compensatory lesser spotted woodpecker (fifth sighting this year.)

It was a male bird, and there's just a hint of his red crown in the photo.

In the afternoon I was drawn down to the wetlands at Dorney again, where I found the bittern in the channel where I first saw it.

A brisk walk to the weir brought nothing new. I walked round the back of Monument Hill just in case there was an early wheatear, but could find only three stock doves.

As I set off on the loop round West Marsh another birder (Bernard Clark) pointed out the Brent goose to me. It was some distance away, but I clicked off a couple of shots from the partially-flooded hide.

The goose flew off to the south, over Dorney Common.

A visit to the county boundary on the Jubilee River this morning produced a voluble and intermittently visible Cetti's warbler, and a gently squealing water rail. There was a cracking of reeds while a small area of stems swayed quite violently. Then the noise and movement stopped, so it wasn't the mink. More like a large bird resettling itself.....

So I went back this evening. The Cetti's was still singing off and on, and the bittern was standing at the end of the same channel through the reeds as yesterday, seen from where the hawthorn bushes on the bank begin.