Today's (Tuesday) report starts the day before with a brief visit on Monday evening to see if I could catch sight of a woodcock. As luck would have it, as I was loitering in the car park (no comments please!) Two woodcock put in a very brief show as it was getting dark. Tuesday was certainly a day of two halves – dull and cloudy to start with lots of small birds, and a beautiful sunny afternoon almost devoid of small birds. As we walked down the zigzag path bullfinches, chaffinch, greenfinch, redwing and fieldfare made their way from bush to bush in front of us as did many blackbirds. At west mead, three ruff, including a very white headed individual, were very busy among the lapwing and grazing wigeon. A peregrine made several amazingly fast low level dashes at the lapwing but soon gave up and just sat there looking out of breath. A few black-tailed godwits were also nervously feeding in the shallows.
Winpenny had two buzzards, a kestrel, snipe and two stonechat, plus hosts of lapwing and assorted wildfowl.
The north brooks had a wonderful squabbling group of about 150 black-tailed godwits that kept peeling backwards and forwards from land to water whenever danger was detected. At least six snipe could be seen hiding in the vegetation and occasionally taking a bit of a sunbathe, and a single ruff was tricky to pick out. Just like last week, two peregrine spooked everything but were more concerned with fighting each other.
A solitary redpoll near the visitor centre was the last bird of the day – no woodcock tonight.
Here is a photo of one of the woodcock from a previous occasion.
Thanks to Gary for his update and photo.