Belated write-up

Bit of a late post now considering the events I shall discuss mainly happened on Monday but I've been in Sheffield for the past few days and so now is the first opportunity I've had to spin my tale of woe concerning not seeing the Savi's warbler on Monday morning at Rutland. I'd actually managed to get myself to Rutland for the not so shabby time of 6am and arrived to find the reserve (along with most of the county) shrouded in fog.  This didnt seem to be putting the birds off their dawn chorus with loads of the commoner warbler species either seen or heard on the way to the Savi's spot where I was slightly proud to find myself the first person present, this rarely happens! To cut a long story short I was there until 8am when I went for a peek at Lagoon 4 as the fog had cleared and then again from 9-10ish and saw/heard precisely zero Savi's. Had a look at Lagoons 3, 4 again, 2 and then 1 after this but couldnt muster much besides a single Curlew Sandpiper on Lagoon 4.

Sedge Warbler giving it some welly

The only positive to be taken from the excursion occured pretty much as soon as I arrived at the Savi's spot at about quarter past 6. Part of the fence has blown down here and besides providing a handy stepladder for people attempting to see over the fence and see the Savi's it has left a section of the adjacent Lagoon 2's margin visible. And it was here that I noticed some strange tail patterns in the water, not unlike the patterns a feeding carp kicks up, heading to the left. A convenient chair was commandeered from the Savi's spot to see over the fence as I followed the trail of disturbed water to near a swans nest on Lag 2 where I got this series of terrible images - the fog and low light was making autofocusing through the vegetation impossible and the combination of excitment and fumbling with the manual focus clearly didnt help matters. It may be helpful to click on the first image and then scroll through them using the right arrow to see that the indistinct brown blur I've circled in the first image is actually moving.

If you havent guessed already, it was another Otter, adding to my first ever sighting of one a couple weeks ago! Somewhat less surprising to be honest though as they are regular at Rutland but seeing this one made me certain that the one I saw on the Soar a couple of weeks ago was definitely a dog otter, this individual seemed smaller and sleeker, indicating to my untutored eye at least, a female or adolescant animal.
It actually showed much better than the terrible images indicate, even sneaking up the swan platform to see if it could steal an egg, the swan just stayed still and the otter quickly retreated once it realised no eggs were exposed.

In other news, I finally tracked down the new Avengers movie when I discovered it was showing well in the Sheffield Odeon yesterday and thankfully we connected along with several other interested observers at 3.45pm. And it was good.
Later on at least 5 Tawny Owl were calling in the grounds of the Botanical gardens, despite the area receiving a severe "wetting". Im still yet to see one though, and this upsets me.

tomorrow perhaps...

I shall go and try to see the Savi's tomorrow I reckon. Two exams today with a three hour supervised period inbetween - dulltastic. And it is perhaps for this reason that I can't be bothered to leg it over to Rutland, despite the fact that this bad boy is a potential full life tick - the best sort of tick, especially when it sneaks onto your county list in the process!
So here, have an owl that I found on the way home today. As you may surmise this is the famed "hooded birders current header image bird" located on its favoured haystack, not quite as good a photo today though im afraid, better than nothing though and it soothes my "what if the savi gets murdered by otters overnight?" urges

A turn for the worse....

The Leicestershire drought conditions have taken a big turn for the worse since my last blog post (well, in the eyes of the Environment Agency's PR department at least) with the Soar at Jubilee having well and truly burst its banks. A quick trip to Jubilee an hour ago to ease the pain of revising palynology discovered this fact with the patch well and truly underwater. I went round to Clarence road in the end to see if anything had dropped into the flooded meadows near the packhorse bridge but there wasn't much about (its because I brought the camera out today of course).

View from Jubilee carpark

View from roadbridge looking at Jubilee

Bridges

Looking towards Narborough Bog

After all this flood related excitement I thought I'd go and see if any Wheatear were still lingering at Grove Park. I did wonder whether the brighter weather today might have cleared them out but they were still present in force. At least ten were confirmed (8 males) but I suspect the true total might have been a touch higher than that.


Success!

It was only in my last post that I outlined my current patch tactic of not taking the SLR to the patch in the hope of tricking rare onto my patch list and it only took three visits until it paid off in spectacular style!

After listening to Leicester beat Leeds I felt a quick patch visit was in order (three days in a row now *shudders*) and made my way down to Jubilee and quickly became aware that the river had risen slightly overnight and most of the grassland was now rather soggy, requiring wellingtons. I had no wellingtons so instead got wet feet as I made my way down to the river. Just as I was setting up the scope for a grill of the pool I noticed something porpoising along the far bank of the river towards me. Things generally never porpoise up the river so this grabbed my attention rather quickly and I soon realised "oh my god, its an Otter". Yes, an Otter! Win! This was a tick of epic proportions too - I'd never seen a wild one anywhere before so to get one on my pitiful excuse of a patch was truly astounding. Seemed like a big male too as it slowly worked its way upstream along the far bank down to a range of about 5 metres, didn't seem to notice me at all.

Unfortunately however, the decision to not bring the canon backfired in truly spectacular fashion at this point as instead of a chance to photograph (albeit in terrible light) a big fat male Otter at close-range I had to make do with a picture taken with shaking hands on the galaxy - in terrible light:

Yes, the photo is craptastic, but its still a patch Otter!

After it worked its way past me and neared the confluence with the Sence it seemed to notice my presence and promptly disappeared, never to be seen again. I stood well back from the confluence for a while and watched to see if it re-appeared but it wasn't to be. But nevermind, still an experience I won't be forgetting in a hurry!

Oh and birds....there may have been birds, but I was too busy Otter hunting to pay attention to such trivalties!

EDIT: The presence of this Stock Dove on the lawn this morning alerted me to the fact that I had forgotten the species on the garden list which I have now amended.

DOUBLE EDIT (I need to stop doing this):

Shortly after I finished this blog post I got a text from Skev alerting me to a "Wheatear fest" at Grove Park and thought it would be rude not to go and see them as one of the main reasons for my patchwatching over the last few days has been the chance of a Wheatear - tantalising totals are being reported everywhere at the minute. And so I joined Skev and Dave Gray at Grove Park and saw 11 juicy Wheatears with minimal difficulty. Very nice although my attempts at photographing them went down much worse than Rid managed earlier, bit jealous on that front!

Patching

As I'm currently being murdered by work birding trips have had to take a back seat recently.....well I say that, its more like im restricting myself to not travel very far or spend a huge amount of time birding at the minute. Still, I've managed to nip down to the patch for an hour for the last two days running - if I keep this up I'll qualify as one of those dedicated patch worker types....can't have that. Either way, a quick timing of the journey down to patch today concludes it takes about 90secs to get there, it would be rude not to really! The canon was not bothered with for either sortie as im working with a new tactic of not taking the SLR in the hope that murphys/sods law will strike and produce something rare - it always happens when you're not prepared! So this is why all photo's in today's post are of the phonescoped/crap variety.

Anyway as for birds

A single Oystercatcher was on the pool yesterday and I heard it a couple times today but couldn't see it anywhere, it was probably on one of the other pools that you can't see from Jubilee:

One of (im assuming) the Common Sandpiper from the other week was also pottering around the pool today but I didn't see it yesterday:

Another Little Egret (or more likely the same recurring bird) was on the pool too today before pretending to be a Cattle Egret for a while:

And this Swallow was the first I've actually seen this year that wasn't flying!

And then, best of all, as I was walking back towards the car-park this afternoon wondering why a Blackbird was making a most un-blackbirdish noise at the top of a tree, a shout behind me from a couple of birders I had been chatting to a few minutes previously alerted me to a lovely Peregrine flying over! Patch tick!

Tales of the unexpected.....

Isn't unexpected birding the best? Like a when normal day is turned into sheer havoc by an absolutely spiffing Black-winged Stilt at Rutland, for example. Occasions when you're out in a totally non-birding situation and see something not exactly rare but completely unexpected are also rather satisfying too. Like glancing upwards whilst walking through Manchester and seeing a Peregrine - also very nice. Or something like what happened to me this evening, I shall set the scene;

You've just been subjected to several hours of Minitab (If you know what this is, you will feel my pain. If not, don't google it under any circumstances, you're better off without it) related torture in the computer labs of Newton building and you leave, bleary eyed, at 1.30am. You have nothing to look forward to on the drive back to Leicester except the dulcet tones of Capital fm and the chance that the wet roads might liven things up by trying to murder you.
Just as you drive over the county border and into Leicestershire you see a Tawny Owl alight from a roadside tree and give pretty satisfactory views in the headlights as it flies away, not bad. Not bad at all when you realise this is first you've actually seen this year. What's more, the roads are much drier the further you get from Shithampton, very nice indeed! Then to make things even nicer, you see a Barn Owl gliding gracefully across the road just a few miles further on, again giving nice headlight views, this decision to stay at uni so long wasn't such a bad idea, you think.

Im going to stop blathering on in this strange style now anyway and just say the Barn Owl sighting was just the beginning of one of those night-time drives that occur now and again where every single nocturnal creature imagineable tries to throw itself under your wheels, clearly bored of life. There was so much about that I even took a slight detour past some Owl sites to see what else I could find. In total I saw 4 owls (Two Tawnies, One barn owl and one bird that was either another barnie or possibly an asio but I didn't get a good enough view), one Muntjac, a billion wabbits, two Foxes and a Badger. I think the owl count alone beats my previous best of owls seen whilst driving that route at night by a smashing 3 whole owls and I'm pretty sure I'd never seen a badger either before (unless you count dead ones, I've seen loads of those).

Timing.....

Ah yes, timing. Timing can be the maker or breaker of us all.
In the recent case of several midlands counties being named as drought regions, this was exceedingly bad timing; it basically hasn't stopped raining since. This makes the authorities look inept and authorities dont like looking inept. In this case I can feel a sort of empathy towards the bungling decision makers that run this country however. The empathy is brought about because until this recent period of rain it has been horribly dry and although it has been the subject of much hilarity all this rain may not change much. Afterall, one period of rainfall is unlikely to be sufficient to replenish surface and groundwater stores of water back to "normal" levels - particularly in the case of aquifers which have a very slow re-fill rate. So, it is entirely likely that this rain won't fix anything for the better and will only cause the Environment Agency and others to be called bunglers and nancys and pooboys. The Governments decision back in the 70's of not constructing a national water grid on the grounds that it was too expensive is looking more and more a foolish decision as current Governments are being faced with the same proposals now but at a much larger cost. Can Governmental plans to spuff a big, fat, wedge of cash on a train-line between London and Birmingham (destroying many valuable habitats in the process, I might add) be justified when basic problems such as provision of water are not at the standards expected of one of the more developed nations? I think not.


Anyway to stop the ranting there an example of good timing was my decision to go down to Jubilee this afternoon in the middle of a moderately intense shower. As Skev mentioned on his blog yesterday, all this weather knocking around means any number of migrants might be forced to drop onto the patch and thus onto my patch list. And so I waited until it was nicely pissing it down and then went for a lookie at the patch to see if anything had dropped in. Two Common Sandpiper was exactly the sort of thing I was after and two common sands was exactly what I got! Would have been nicer if they had been greens and thus a patch tick but this is only my 2nd or 3rd (yes, im terrible with records) record of them on patch so no complaints really. They swiftly flew off towards the other (out of view) pools though, highlighting the benefits of good timing! A text was sent out anyway to Sir Skev Markington on the off chance they came back and turns out they did, how nice of them! House Martin and Blackcap were also new for the patch yearlist and two pairs of Tufted Duck were on the pool - new since the last visit.


Anyway to make up for the lack of photos so far have a couple of the current Leicestershire drought conditions:

EDIT: been meaning to do this for a while but have only just got around to it - my profile now has a contact email - its hoodedbirder@hotmail.co.uk if you would like to get in touch about anything. As you may have surmised this isn't my personal email account but I will check it regularly and try to respond to everything that isn't ludicrous/idiotic/on fire.

EDIT #2: and I've just added a new page at the top which is the current garden list, I'll do the patch one next but lets not get carried away with this listing lark, thats the first proper bird list I've ever written!

EDIT #3: I must be gravely ill as I've just got back from visiting the patch for the second time in one day! Shocking behaviour! In my defence it did look for all the world like the heavens were going to open, noah-style and so would be an ideal time for a juicy migrant to drop into Jubilee. In the end the rain passed by Jubilee and although I got one of the Common Sandpipers from earlier the only things new (or things I missed earlier - this is more likely) was a Little Egret and Grey Wagtail around the pool and a spanking male Reed Bunting along the river. Oh yes and probably the same Fox that Skev saw yesterday was cruising around looking for something to menace. A quick look at the newly christened "Owl and Snipe field" (never seen either species in this field but I reckon I will if I start/keep looking) across the road from Jubilee produced nothing but that shall not deter me from checking the field again regularly.