Wetland Bird Survey counts - September (and August!) 2022 + recent wildlife news!

Casting our minds back to August, it is often a quieter time for birds as they skulk around, feeding and recovering from the rigours of the breeding season and a bit more effort is required to find anything. And so attention turns to butterflies and dragonflies and excitingly two species of damselfly were seen for the first time at Langford this year, willow emerald and small red-eyed damselfly. I am awaiting photos of them both, so for now you'll have to imagine what they look like. Unsurprisingly the former is green the latter small with red eyes... Birding interest was still there however, with a Langford 'mega' -  a female house sparrow being seen, along with spotted redshank, garganey, black-necked grebe, various waders, 14 ravens (a new site record!), yellow wagtail and regular sightings of hobby, great white egret and bittern.

September traditionally gets (even) more exciting for birds with records to date including curlew sandpiper, osprey, redstart, various waders (including 9 turnstone), regular marsh harrier(s) and the first signs of winter with pintail and pink-footed geese being seen.

Here's the black-necked grebe, photographed by Roger Bennet during a reed planting work party (10000+ seedlings already planted this year!)

In terms of WeBS count data, the team have continued braving the elements (fog in September and heat in August) to record the wildfowl and waders on site, this is very useful for our own records, but also feeds into the BTO's national survey data. September's data is directly below, followed by August's:

P1 (Phase 1) and P2 (Phase 2) data combined as P1 in August table below: