Good morning!
How are you today?
Just a quick post about some of the wildlife highlights for yesterday.
We had some lovely views of hobby flying over the Draper hide hunting dragonflies
The garganey is back at the Tern hide. Keep an eye out at the Tern hide you never know what you might see from there at the moment. In winter we lower the water level on this lagoon so you can see the islands - we also raise the water level at the Draper hide so we alwaysh ahve an area of open water and an area of scrape all year round. It's good for the reedbed at the Draper hide to have a higher water level in winter - it's what reeds like!
Anyhoo, keep an eye on the Tern (and at the moment Draper) hide scrape as you might see a whole variety of passage waders. We've had lovely views of common and green sandpiper, lapwing and snipe.
There is also a good number of ducks around as well - teal, shoveler, garganey, gadwall, mallard and tufted duck. At the moment a lot of the ducks are looking a little dodge - they are in eclipse, changing their feathers into winter plumage so they might look a little strange!The garganey, isn't looking as smart as it can do in it's smartest breeding plumage but the best identifying feature at the moment is the eye stripe.
Teal by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)