A Wild Goose Chase - Part I

With a wall to wall bout of torrential rain almost all day long yesterday there was but a 20 minute respite at 11:20 when we dashed out and fed the chickens, collected the eggs and returned to barracks empty handed from the Moth Traps. However, it was not all doom and gloom as mid-afternoon miraculously we added a NEW SPECIES to our already substantial World List!!!!

We will leave you in suspense for now but sure as eggs is eggs the full story will be heading your way in the next few days. This and the following Post are from Wednesday.

A Beautiful Start to New Winter's Day

The first full night of November was a chill one followed by a day of wall to wall sunshine, hardly a cloud in the sky, no wind or precipitation and so FULL it has to come in 2 Parts!

 As part of my early morning update from John Gifford in Weymouth came the news that Hampshire had recorded their first

WHITE-FRONTED GEESE
of the season with the word 'fronted' relating to birds being a bar across what we would describe as forehead. When first kicking off on this milarky in the early 1970's the winter population of this splendid looking Wildfowl on the Hampshire River Avon (the border between Dorset and that County) was usually in 3-figures but alas no more. Now 'scarce' or maybe even considered 'rare' this is indeed a difficult bird to locate in the South nowadays - so worth a go at the traditional site! Nothing to shout about or even talk about on home turf so on a LONG, LONG shot it was the water meadows of the

HAMPSHIRE AVON
looking north and viewed from

IBSLEY BRIDGE
and ditto

looking south where also flows the

IBSLEY WEIR
Apart from the totally expected few dozen Mute Swans it was worth a try a little further on beyond

HARBRIDGE MANOR and the almost attached CHURCH

where the Water Meadows were completely devoid of any life
except when half way through a 9-point turn when a

GREAT WHITE EGRET
decided to fly over a 'first' at least for the late Winter.
It is always worth a stop at

despite there being little chance of a W-f Goose there but the whole place appeared to be in
Lock Down
with half a dozen cars awaiting opening time. A Plan B is usually of help under such circumstances with a hole in the hedge proving to be an ideal place to see and click the few

GOOSANDER
plying back and forth.

Female

male
but not a Goose to be seen.
Having driven that far it it is always worth the extra few miles to investigate the beauty of the

NEW FOREST 

so 'hard 'a' Port at the

turn off.

With thoughts of Geese completely cleared it was at this point that things started to come to me rather than the other way about but you simply cannot miss the wild mammal that is the

NEW FOREST PONY

although each is 'owned' by somebody.

Even the Tiny but Most Attractive Little Cottage right at its Heart
must be worth a 'pretty penny'!
This is where the

PIGS
came to me and on an educated try, without looking them up, they might well be from left
SADDLEBACK, TAMWORTH and one of the OLDSPOTS?

What came next we did not want to see, there is enough of it back home, but how anyone can
Desecrate a National Park a Jewel in our Countries Crown beggers belief!

more

PONIES

Onward to

and a brief stop at the now deserted

ROYAL OAK
who will rid us of the meddlesome disease??

TO BE CONTINUED