Saturday, December 17, 2011
A lesser spotted woodpecker......
......in the Burnham Beeches area was a lucky find as I only had about an hour for a walk. I caught sight of him from the path, and when he didn't fly off I walked a little way into the trees. He was still quite distant, so the photos are severely cropped.
Even when the woodpecker was relatively motionless for a few seconds, his head generally wasn't!
He was foraging fairly low down. The growth further up the branch is probably Yellow Brain Fungus.
When I looked at this photo I thought the bird was using a stick to poke food out of a hole, like the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands. Then I realised it probably was the food, in the shape of a white larva.
Elsewhere, a great spotted woodpecker looked strange as it foraged on the ground among dead leaves and beech-mast until I realised what it was (in fact, I saw all three woodpeckers today), and a meadow pipit on the Abbey Park Farm fields was a woods tick for me.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
A quick stop-off at Marsh Lane after a shopping trip brought a bar-headed goose with greylags on the other side of the Jubilee River.
I think this is still classed as an escape, but it's a very nice-looking escape.Saturday, December 10, 2011
The woods are alive with the sound of shooting
At least they were in Combe, West Berkshire today. It was pretty cold up at the Gibbet, with an icy breeze that stung the face; but there was plenty of sunshine to make up for it.
In the woods, we saw a party of goldcrests and two marsh tits, and heard the calls of bullfinch and willow tit. There were several fusillades of shots ahead of us; then the noise ceased and several vehicles came lurching along the track, one with several dead pheasants strapped to the bonnet. I could see a dark shape high in a birch tree and wondered if it was a raven. But a look through the bins showed a very still, very wary (possibly traumatised!) pheasant.
There wasn't much else of note in the way of birds until the final stretch along the top of Walbury Hill. With the sun near the horizon and the sky streaked with purple and gold, a flock of twenty-six golden plover was restless and vocal above the sheep, flying now in a tight knot and now in a gull-like V, their fluty calls making a lovely end to the day. 
Not quite the end, though. As we drove back to the A4 through the lanes, a sparrowhawk materialised from the hedgerow. Greger reckoned it flew along the road in front of the car for about 100 metres, at 25 mph and possibly as low as 20-30 centimetres above the ground before swerving up and over the hedge and out of sight.Saturday, December 03, 2011
A lesser spotted woodpecker in the Portman Burtley woods (Dorney Wood) adjoining Burnham Beeches was compensation for not going further afield today. As usual the bird was silent and I located it by scanning the trees with the naked eye; but I'd only just got onto it when a great spotted woodpecker flew into the same tree and chased it away.
It didn't go far, and the move was a bonus for me as it revealed the red cap of a male.
Two marsh tits were a nice find as I haven't seen any for ages; and there were plenty of redwings, goldcrests, nuthatches, and treecreepers, although I saw only two lesser redpolls on a fairly limited round walk.
Later, I had a second sighting of a lesser spotted woodpecker in Egypt Woods; again it was a male and it could well have been the same bird. Today's encounter was my first sighting in the three woods since March and my eighth there this year.
