Hennock

As it's manking with rain today, I'm posting a couple of pictures of the local area and its wildlife.

First of all, however, a very, very manky picture of the 2w drake King Eider in North Devon - partly just to 'prove I was there', partly to show he's a far better-looking bloke than he was at the beginning of this year, bless him. At the start of the year he looked very much like this (links to Birdguides website). Now he looks like this:

Or, if you want to see something that doesn't look like it was taken through a milk bottle by a myopic woodlouse, try this lot... Anyway. That's enough about top shelf birds. On to some local info. This is the sort of countryside we're living in:



As you can see, fairly pastoral and green. At the moment we're seeing a lot of corvids (Rook, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow and Jay in order of abundance), Woodpigeon and Herring Gull. As far as the smaller stuff goes, there seem to be plenty of Blackbird and Redwing around at the moment, with the usual common garden birds like Blue, Great and Coal Tit, House Sparrow, Robin, Dunnock, blah, blah, blah... We're also getting regular Grey and Pied Wagtail around the cattle in the field below us, with occasional Meadow Pipit dropping in. I'll have to start a patch list at this rate! This is the -already famous, har har - sewage works down the road:


Which holds pretty much what you'd expect: Blackbird, Robin, Wren, Dunnock, Blue, Great and Long-tailed Tit, Bullfinch, these chaps:

...and the Yellow-browed. I spent a while at the gate yesterday watching it, making sure it wasn't a Hume's YBW (no luck, more's the pity). I suppose my next task will be to try and get some pictures. Totally failed to pick up Firecrest as well - but there must be one around here somewhere, I'm sure. New for my new site yesterday were a Kestrel and a Jay.

And just for Mark, cos I'm sure he misses them, this was outside the front door about 10 minutes ago:

(Eurasian) Nuthatch Sitta europaea - it's blurred because I was photographing at 1/40th of a second through our front door glass.

Long time no postings...

Seems like a long time since writing anything. Quick roundup: lots of Siskins ringed in the garden now: 48 and counting so far, with a very low retrap rate; suggesting plenty of birds moving through. Other local ringers have accounted for another 250-odd and no-one appears to have caught anyone else's bird as yet. Plenty of Siskins around, and all of a sudden. None of us are complaining!

Attended the Southwest Ringers' Conference in Exeter last Saturday, which was pretty good. A range of interesting talks, particularly about the use of ringing as a tool for conservation and monitoring as well as the chance to put a few names to faces and do some schmoozing...

Sunday found me attempting to ring in the garden, then when the weather caught up with me, finally giving in to the temptation to go and see Devon's first King Eider Somateria spectabilis. The bird is (at the time of writing) in North Devon, at the mouth of the Taw-Torridge estuary complex. It's not the best-looking, as it's a first-winter drake (should be S. unspectabilis, really!) , and the views I had would be comfortably described as atrocious, but it's my first new bird in the county for over a year. I didn't take any pictures, so if you want to see a similar bird, check out this link. The photos there are, would you believe, a tad better than the views I had, but it is 'just' a King Eider! The sweeping rain and biting north wind didn't help; nor did the fact that I'd packed only one glove... Otherwise the highlight was an interesting - leucistic? - Rook Corvus frugilegus, which I did photograph and post the obligatory cruddy picture below.



Here's another Rook looking thoroughly miserable in the grotty weather:


I had intended to get to Trew Plantation on the way back to search for Great Grey Shrike, but unaccountably couldn't find the site on my roadmap, so gave in and had a go for the one on Dartmoor instead. Inevitably I got there a touch late in the day and the presence of a noisy crowd of kiddiewinks didn't help. Great that they're thundering round the countryside and getting some quality exercise in, but it's a bit of a bummer when they trash your birding. Ah well... that's life. I did manage to find a smart male Dartford Warbler Sylvia undata before the kids got there! Rounded off the day with a pleasant sunset and a nice chat with a fellow birder who was also shrike-seeking. I was also slightly startled to see the quantity of frogspawn present at such a high point on the moors - some of it will inevitably be frozen and killed, but that also leaves more resources for the survivors. Life's a bitch...!

Sunset at Warren House Inn