4th October

What a difference a few days of rain makes: the torrential rain of the last few days has taken the Meadow from dry and birdless to completely reforming the floods and full of birds! On Friday there were some noticeable puddles and a big increase in birds with lots of geese everywhere. Come Saturday and we had actual flood waters albeit still in two parts. By Sunday the floods were back to a proper size and there were birds everywhere with more flying in by the hour. You could gauge progress by the number of Wigeon that were about. On Friday it was about 10, on Saturday it had grown to 25 and on Sunday it was over 200! It's great to have this charismatic duck back on the Meadow along with it's lovely "pieuw" call.

 

Video showing just some of the birds all flocking to the floods

As you can see from the video, the usual Barnacle Geese are back for the winter. They've been around for a few days now though they were hanging out half way up the Meadow until the floods tempted them back to the southern end. We've had a noticeable increase in Canada Geese as well with over 300 alongside the usual feral Greylags. As I mentioned, we now have a couple of hundred Wigeon alongside a more modest count of Teal. Ollie Padget managed to find the star bird of weekend however when he picked out a female Garganey from in amongst the Teal. The bird was distant and the light terrible but between us we managed to pick out the saliant ID features to make sure of what we had.

A couple of "record shot" photos of the female Garganey

Other ducks that were about were four female Pintail, four Gadwall and a couple of Shoveler. On Saturday we also had the usual feral White-fronted Geese pay us a visit. These birds usually live at Blenheim and at least two of them have some Bar-headed Goose genes in them and look very weird.

We also had our first waders of the autumn with a Dunlin and a Snipe on the floods along with half a dozen Lapwing - I'm hoping for a lot more over the coming days. To round things off Joe Wynn had a Peregrine, no doubt lured to the area by the huge number of birds about. Other species that are around are lots of Pied Wagtails, Meadow Pipits, a few Skylarks and the usual Linnets.

Other sightings over the last few says have included more flyover Siskins, a couple of fly-over Redpolls, a Wheatear up by the allotments and a Cetti's Warbler just past the A34 fly-over (both of the latter two courtesy of Nick Boyd). Ollie Padget and Joe Wynn had the first Redwings of autumn in Burgess Field as well. Nicola Devine also heard a female Tawny Owl calling by the woods alongside the railway one evening.

The Garganey and the Tawny Owl are both year ticks - it's really nice to have the total "ticking over" again. In terms of what we're still missing that we might reasonably expect I have: Little Grebe, Fieldfare, Knot, Med Gull, Sanderling and Green Sandpiper all on my list. It's only thanks to the early reformation of the floods that we can even contemplate some of those waders. I must emphasise how unusual it is to have floods in October - it's usually November when they reform so this is a golden opportunity to try to find some proper rares during the best birding month of the year. At the very least we should get the tail end of the wader passage and I'm starting to day dream about some yank waders - for some reason I keep thinking about Buff-breasted Sandpiper, which would be a county first! One can dream and it does at least keep me motivated to check out the floods each day.