Photo by RSPB Images
The lagoons finally thawed last weekend, and the wildfowl have made a welcome return. Numbers of teal and wigeon haven't yet recovered to pre-Big Freeze levels, but shoveller, gadwall and red-breasted mergansers are back on the lagoons, and the 6 goldeneyes we've been seeing regularly have decided that they can sense Spring in the air and have started displaying to each other. Seems a long way off still, but these signs of the gradual turning of the year bring a bit of hope after such a cold and hard few weeks of snow and ice.
Another sign of the thaw was the reappearance of a bittern on 3 January - the last one we had in December also appeared in the few days of thaw between the two freezes, a time when birds no doubt move around to find new areas of open water that they can feed in. Bittern is one of the birds that find it hard to survive prolonged frozen spells, which led to their supplementary feeding last year by some RSPB reserves, so it's always good news to see another one that's made it through a freeze. We've had a fair few phone calls from folk seeing woodcock in their gardens over the last couple of weeks too - these birds are normally very shy and stick to their favoured damp woodland areas, but hard weather drives them out into gardens in a desparate search for food. Two birds have been seen on the reserve in the last week, and hopefully they're managing to find it easier to feed now that the ground has softened a little. A kingfisher also reappeared on the reserve as soon as the waters started to thaw.
Another excellent spot this week was a firecrest, seen on 5 January in the scrub between the Bridge Pond and the Carneddau Hide. We have had sporadic reports of firecrest since November, but they always seem to be pretty elusive, so it's possible that all the sightings are of the same individual. Much easier to see are the increasing numbers of siskins taking advantage of the niger seed feeder in the Wildlife Garden, and up to 4 redpoll have also been seen in the same area for the last few days. Starling numbers remain high in the roost (and they've pretty much flattened all our reedbed areas), but they are still going in fast and low rather than doing the full display on most nights. It's still pretty impressive when they whoosh past your ears at great speed (although not so impressive when your hat gets liberally decorated by them, as mine has on a few occasions!).