12th Sept. No seabirds and an owl.

Yesterday afternoon I did a small tour of a few of the reservoirs in Leicestershire on the hunt for seabirds again. First stop was Thornton which looked like this:

No seabirds were present however and the best of it came from 3 Little Grebe that were quite rightly avoiding the swarms of bread-crazed fake ducks that inhabit Thornton. Didn't bother with circumventing the reservoir as frankly I couldn't be arsed so I moved onto the dam at Cropston reservoir which was.........fucking windy to say the least.

Cropston being windy

So windy infact that using a telescope became almost impossible and stable viewing could only be achieved using bins. Not there was anything particularly fancy to see anyway, a juv. Arctic Tern brightened things up nicely however as I had been considering dropping into Watermead on the way home to see the bird that has been lingering there recently.

The third and last reservoir I visited yesterday was Swithland which was also poor (also scuppered by the fact that I chose to view it from a spot looking directly into the sun) but did throw up single Greenshank and Common Sandpiper and also a couple of Nuthatch in the trees surrounding the res. I do suspect more waders were present than the two I saw but as I said, I picked about the worst place to view from. I was going to visit Groby pool as I was in the area on the hunt for the Redstart that has been knocking around there recently but I decided to bail as such a plan involved walking - far too much effort!

Yesterday evening I went out for an owl again with the intention of staking out the likely Tawny Owl roost site - no sightings were made during the last hour of light. Previous to this I had visited a Little Owl site where I was reasonably confident of a sighting - in periods of high wind the owls can be quite easy to locate aslong as you know the sheltered spots where they like to hide from the worst of it. So sticking my head over a hedge to see if the Owls were present I was rather surprised to find no owls but one Paul Riddle instead who was erecting some perching posts for future use by the owls. After a chinwag over the hedge with Paul who gripped me off immensely recounting how he'd just had 5 owls in that very spot (and got to within about 10 feet of them)  about ten minutes previous I headed on and soon after picked up one of his displaced juveniles perched above a knot in a roadside tree. No photo's unfortunately as I didnt bother taking the scope out last night (shows how confident I was about my Tawny stakeout!).