Christine's walking & birds blog

The three woods

The first thing I noticed this morning was that the wood ants have woken up. Old stumps and nests were alive with them; so all carefree, leisurely birding is over for now (unless you don't actually mind having them swarm over your feet and up your legs!)

Hearing the constant twittering of siskins, I followed the sound to a plantation of larches. The siskins however were mostly in the beech trees, flying down to drink now and then from a puddle in the rut of the track.

This siskin was very interested in a hole in a mature beech, where a large branch had broken off.

A redpoll was also diving into the hollow. The bird almost seems like a candidate for common (mealy) redpoll; but it's more "creamy" than "frosty" in appearance and it's probably an unusually pale lesser redpoll.

A brambling was high in a beech, catching the sun nicely but mostly obscured by twigs. A couple of whistling "swit" calls alerted me to Mandarin ducks, and three of them were glimpsed as they went scudding over the tree-tops.

The verges along the country lanes between the woods were alive with small mammals. I initially thought this was a mouse; but I think with its rather blunt nose and small eyes it could be a bank vole. I never got a good look at the tail. Sometimes they run along under the leaves, so you just hear a rustling and then see the leaves moving above them.

Cliveden

In the afternoon I went to Cliveden. Waiting in the queue to turn into the car park while hordes of people trooped over the crossing, I opened the car window and heard a FIRECREST singing, exactly where I saw one in September last year. So, when I'd trekked back from the overflow car park to the main drive, I knew at least where to look. The bird was foraging restlessly and I couldn't get a picture.