12th October

It's been a good week for birding on the Meadow. The floods expanded enough for the river briefly to burst its banks and we had a couple of days in Lake Mode before it quickly subsided where it's now been pretty stable in size for a few days now. The birds are all loving it and the water is covered in all directions, mostly with geese with Canadas and Greylags and the Barnacles all hanging out in good numbers. Duck numbers actually haven't been that large with just modest counts of Wigeon and Teal and a few Shoveler but it's still rather early in the season. Our star Garganey has been hanging around all week and we've also had one or two Ruff which have dropped in though the shoreline is rather "lumpy" at the moment because of the vegetation so it's often difficult to spot the waders. However, the stand-out bird since last time has been a Whooper Swan which was found on Saturday by Colm O'Caomhanaigh.

The Whooper Swan on the day it was found

In the past "winter" swans such as Whoopers and Bewicks have occasionally dropped in on the Meadow at around this time of year. However they never normally stay at all and indeed this bird headed off fairly early on Sunday morning. However it didn't seem quite to know where it wanted to go: it was found (by Colm again!) up by the Victoria pub on the river Cherwell mid morning before coming back to the Meadow where it spent the rest of the day. Finally on Monday morning it was off fairly early.

Apart from that there's been various reports of increased bird movement recently including Redwings which are now starting to be seen regularly. Indeed in a ringing session in Burgess Field Ollie Padget and his team managed to catch a pair.

A couple of Redwing "in the hand"

Finally, one of the star birds of the week was actually only mentioned to me en passant when Nick Boyd happened to say that he'd had a Yellowhammer fly over during a moring visit. This species is a real Patch Mega - there's only been one record during my time on the Meadow which was during one of the extraordinary winters where thick snow lead to a lot of winter bird displacement and Steve Goddard had this species in his garden. You would think that you might find them around the farmland over by Medley Farm but, whilst it is indeed a rather underwatched area, I've not heard of any records there.

Looking ahead the wind is swinging back to easterlies for the next few days which is great for east coast birding but whether this will mean anything filters through to us or not is another matter. Personally I'm still hoping for a yank wader of some kind to turn up now that we've got the floods back. One can dream!