Quiet times in early April

Now its spring, you feel like getting up and going on some exciting trips again. Unfortunately, the airflow has been predominantly northernly recently, and birding has been fairly quiet. Its a case of trying your best to cobble together a decent days birding with a few target species thrown in.

Biggest recent news was the recent finding of a Cetti's Warbler at some site in Stoke-on-Trent; a long awaited and much predicted site first and it was succesfully twitched by all of the current active listers of the infamous site. Incredibly, its the third site first in three years - gives you the incentive to keep plodding around on a daily basis. At least we don't have to make sightings up and pretend at this site like they do at other inner city sites.

So to get the blog up to date. 

Saturday 1st April was a day where we struggled to construct a day out so we stayed in Staffordshire and gathered together a few county year ticks. We headed back down to the deepest SE corner of the county and saw the Whittington SW over wintering Yellow-browed Warbler again. This is my first ever sighting in April (you don't have an April list - oh no!). We then headed to Himley Hall for the feral/tame/ill Whooper Swan that allows people to get very close to so they can post pictures on twitter saying "showing well" but decided not to go and look for it as there was news breaking about a WHITE STORK in Derbys. As I was driving, CJW thought maybe it was from a German ringing scheme and so it was possibly worth a punt. 

As we headed over, it became clear that it was just another escaped bird. We headed into Branston instead where we walked around using the paths and made a note of birds we saw. We then headed off into the north of the county, and as I was driving, I noted a sign saying three-quarters of a mile to Sudbury Hall. Well it would have been rude not to have popped in!

This is the Polish White Stork that hit wires and was flown over to Britain to be mended, and was seen at Welney WWT last year.

Saturday 8th April - We hoped again that something would turn up, but with another week of NW (literally no new migrants in at the Stoke-on-Trent site this week), there wasn't much to go for. We started off at our usual local patch, but when news came that the NIGHT HERON was still in Shropshire, we walked faster and headed off into Shropshire, a county we don't visit too often. (for the record, my Shropshire list stands at five birds - Lesser Scaup, Marsh Warbler, Spoonbill, Crane and Iberian Chiffchaff).

It was my first ever visit to Venus Pools, and we managed to walked from the car park to the bird without being directed or spoken too. The Night Heron was showing ok ish for a roosting bird, and we spoke too Young Billy and Grizzly who were already on site.

Night Heron at Venus Pools by NJS

 

We soon found out there had been no sign yet this morning of the possible returning IBERIAN CHIFFCHAFF, but we headed over to the nearby Yellow-browed Warbler on the NW side of Telford. We parked up and entered the wood and joined up with Stoke lads Grant "Granty" Price and Andy "M". Luckily, as soon as we entered the wood, the YBW started calling, and CJW soon located it high up in the trees above us. It also did a small bit of sub-songing. This now becomes my latest ever YBW in Britain, and, although its only April, it is my 3rd YBW of the year. Hopefully we'll still see a few in Autumn as well.

A quick drive up to Whixall Moss saw the Wood Sandpiper still present. I have a feeling that this may be the Blithfield bird that was seen briefly at Radford Meadows. 

We were a bit stuck now having seen three out of the four target birds. But when news reached us that a SHORE LARK was on Clee Hill, we just could resist a bit more birding in Shropshire.CJW did a sterling job by chauffeuring me around, and within an hour we were parked up on Clee Hill. The sky was blue, we could see all 14 counties and three countries visible from up here and there was the Shore Lark sat on top of a ridge. A Shropshire mega tick firmly in the bag!

Shore Lark, Clee Hill, Shropshire NJS