Thank you to volunteer Phil for his report and photos!
Recent Sightings Friday 16th September – The Resident Peregrine
Another autumnal Friday after overnight storms, saw a Northerly wind providing a chill factor particularly to the North Brooks, in complete contrast to the heatwave of earlier in the week.
Nevertheless the Hanger provided excellent views of the resident peregrine which on this occasion chose to perch on a very open dead branch of its usual willow tree pointing directly at the viewpoint.
I hadn’t seen much of this bird for a while and I had wondered whether it had moved away to find food with scarcity of wildfowl here over the summer.
My colleague John and I tried our hands at digiscoping but the strong wind was not helpful. However the attached close up photos (John’s one is the front view), give some idea of the bird which spent much of its time preening in various contortionist positions at one point seeming as if it t was trying to pluck out its own feathers.
We noted that there was a ring on the right leg. It was impossible to read this but it did confirm that it was most likely the resident bird that we know has been ringed as a chick at the nest in an old quarry near Amberley Station just a few miles away. We also noted that, the streaks on the breast were now in a horizontal pattern, whereas a few months ago they had been in the vertical pattern characteristic of juvenile peregrines.
Elsewhere on the reserve there appeared to be a complete lack of waders (maybe out of sight behind the long rushes), but John thought he caught a glimpse of a snipe taking off. While undertaking a ditch survey on Monday I’d flushed 4 snipe near Winpenny so there are definitely some on the reserve now.
Teal, mallard and now increasing numbers of wigeon, were all present on the North Brooks but a garganey reported by one of our regular and experienced visitors earlier in the day proved elusive.
No yellow wagtails could be found around the cattle. Perhaps they had decided to move south driven by the strong northerly wind. However the wind didn’t seem to bother the goldfinches which have been charming us for a few weeks now and were on good form once again. Lively flocks could be seen all over the reserve feeding on seed heads, particularly ragwort and thistle, and at Winpenny coming in for a drink and a wash in the pool.
A female redstart was duly to be seen on a fence from Redstart Corner. However my attempt to digiscope this bird was aborted when a volunteer colleague Mark pointed out a lesser whitethroat and a pair of blackcaps.
With the weather becoming increasingly sunny I took a stroll down to Hail’s View in the late afternoon. I noted that the fenced area next to Black Pond created to allow for closer viewing of dragonflies and damselflies is now open to visitors so I went in to see if anything was visible, finding a female emerald damselfly
In Black Wood by the path both sexes of common darters were to be found, the red male and more cryptically coloured female seeming to like a particular old tree stump, now bathed in sunshine.
Once again a rather unpromising day had provided a lot of interest.