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

Nobody's Fault but Mine - Led Zeppelin

BLUE-NAPED CHLOROPHONIA

 (Colombia 2010)

With the Readership dwindling even further (nobody’s fault but mine) we came up with the idea of a ‘Bird of the Week’ image each Sunday to get things going with this being the first even though it’s only Thursday. Despite not having a pessimistic bone in our body reality spells the end of the Blog before the end of the year - we will wait to see!

You can only lead your horse to the Water!

After yet another and short lacklustre rounds on our home turf we had to try other measures to fill today;s post so toddled off to Longham Lakes again in hopes! There we found little difference by way of species but numbers in some cases had increased since our last visit with one new addition. We hadn't got through the gate before the first

GREAT WHITE EGRET
flew overhead

and later found there was an additional single

taking the day count to 5.
At the same spot c3

EGYPTIAN GEESE

were the new additions to the

species count of the

previous visit while the

GREAT CRESTED GREBE

count appeared to be the same.
Interesting to note some of the plumage differences among the

BLACK-HEADED GULLs

with almost full black-caps of the adults

and far less so with the juvenile which we attempted to video

before the 'camera hog' backed in.
Continuing with the Gulls there had been a marked increase in

COMMON GULL

numbers

while those of the humble

HERRING GULL
remained static as we could only find this single juvenile on the day.

The largest increase of all fell to the

COOT

with numbers having increased 10 fold but no change in the numerous

TUFTED DUCK

LITTLE EGRET
while as far as we could tell the

STONECHAT
remains as a singleton.
Finally, we add this clip of another

GREAT WHITE EGRET
but as much for the short vocal outburst of a
Cetti's Warbler.

and still awaiting the first Moth of Late Winter!

Hazy Shade of Winter - Simon and Garfunkle

For the sake of continuity all Moth records are dated from the evening on which the Traps are fired up so, by the time we post this the traps of the First Day of the Month are as yet to be attended.

It is on such a day, the first of the month, that in the past we would have undertaken a Day Twitch, that is to say race around intending to see as many species as possible within our patch but the number of Moths has put paid to that but we may resurect on New Year's Day? Otherwise this Post does reprsent the first day of the month except for the Moths which are the late residue from November!

There was no surprise as to the first Bird of tis end of the Winter, in fact we had been waiting for it, as having seen and heard them a couple or 3 weeks ago across the northern section, that it should have been the ‘chacking’ of a number of

FIELDFARE

in the riverside Ash trees that should herald both the New Month and New Season.

However, you won't be seeing the likes of this in Dorset or even the rest of
Great Britain - nesting Fieldfare Estonia 2010.

A misty start at daybreak which took some time to clear with the

OLD CURRENT BUN
being hampered by low cloud eventually opened up to a few Moths

CHESTNUT

RED-GREEN CARPET

FEATHERED THORN
along with another

SATTELITE
surely we are getting close to the end of it?
Had we been carrying out a Twitch we would certainly have capitalised at the
Irrigation Pond with a 'hat-trick of goodies with a new pair of

TUFTED DUCK

female
and

male
the first and vocal

CETTI'S WARBLER
at this location during 2020 and the continuing and equally vocal

WATER RAIL
and another welcome suprise, after an absence of a couple or 3 weeks,
suddenly and restricted to the south east corner of the Heath and close to the Rare Breed Goats Enclosure maybe as many as a dozen each of

STONECHAT

and

DARTFORD WARBLER
some clinging on to juvenile plumage and

with the hopes of them over-wintering here!