Wow what a stunningly beautiful morning today compared to the heavy rain and chilly Northerly wind of yesterday! But of course birdwatching is not a fair weather pastime and the change in conditions brought a bit of autumn migration back to the Humber.
We also manged to 'ship' off most of the water that had accumulated on the active wader lagoons of Marshland, Xerox and Townend and cut the vegetation in front of Marshland so hopefully everything is all set for the weekend! We have some good numbers of greenshank (17), spotted redshank (28), Ruff (20) Redshank (35), snipe (20+), green sandpiper (4), with then a mix of other's around with occassional black tailed godwits (up to 6), single dunlin, 2 turnstone (over) and then a very brief flyover curlew sandpiper. There are also up to 22 curlew on the grazing marsh and odd parties of oystercatcher west. It will be interesting to see if we get a late passage of smaller wader but we are certainly missing the Northerlies and Easterlies that we need to bring the eastern breeders. Interestingly I was reading one of the old reserve reports from the 1980's and I can assure everyone that there were indeed blank curlew sandpiper years back in the good old days! Funny how we all remember the best passage years.
Other summer passage migrants present yesterday were whinchat and wheatear with also a few 'winter' migrants including 7 pintail on Singleton lagoon and a few widgeon plus the first signs of some meadow pipit passage. I also heard that last week someone had spotted a rare Kenus Clarkus on the reserve, a first for the site!
Our reserve 'regulars' are still entertaining well too with the Marsh harrier roost building up, bittern still around Singleton, and water rail showing stupendously on Townend and First. I'm hoping too with a little settled weather that the beardies may start showing better as they come out of their complete body moult, but don't bank on it as its been a very unpredictable year for this species!
Other notable birds around site include plenty of yellow wagtails, hobby, and on an evening Barn Owls but you do have to stay quite late.
Plenty of other wildlife around too with dragonflies, hoverflies, fungi aplenty. For those of you who read my last Fungi blog I have indeed now found the Glockendungerling and will update next week on my fungi forays in the horse and now cow dung!
Evening sunsets at this time of year can be breathtaking on the reserve, and something to watch out for tonight is a Blue Moon!