Thursday, March 31, 2016
After a frosty night, a settled sunny morning drew us out into the garden to continue the spring tidy-up. The flowering currant was attracting several honey bees and a few bumblebees, such as this buff-tailed queen.
The afternoon became cool and windy, and between bouts of housework I surfed the birding net. Down south in familiar haunts, two good birds have been reported recently - a common scoter at Dorney Lake (Eton College Rowing Lake), and a lesser spotted woodpecker in Egypt Woods (which we failed to see on our March trip).
The woodpecker was seen in Whitespark Wood; I've never been able to work out where one of these woods-within-a-wood ends and another begins, but of my sightings of the lesser-spots in Egypt, three have been roughly in this section. Others: two between Whitespark and Staplefurze Wood, five well inside Staplefurze, eight in Heathfield Wood, three in Nine Acre Wood, and an unexpected summer sighting in Healy's Gorse. Evocative names, nice to call them to mind.