The good, the bad and the ugly

Yesterday I had a pretty miserable day on the birding front. I dipped Skevs Wheatear at Jubilee and then, eschewing the chance to go and see the Ring Ouzels at Timberwood Hill, I made the choice to go and find my own Ring Ouzel at Croft Hill instead. I did this because of previous urges to find my own birds and Croft Hill is a good shout for one at this time of year. Too bad I didn't drag myself up there until mid afternoon when the hordes of dog walkers had turned the place into a birdless wasteland.
So that brings me to today

The good (or should it be bad?): After not seeing any Ouzels yesterday I quickly settled for looking at other peoples today and so pootled off to Thornton res. where three birds had been reported a couple of hours previously. But they were nowhere to be found upon arrival. Bugger, I checked the whole Markfield arm too.... twice! The visit was rescued (cue the good bit) from being a total washout by a lovely close encounter with a pair of Goldcrest which just occasionally sat still long enough for a couple of images to be taken:

The bad (or should it be good?):
After this It would have been rude not to carry onto the Timberwood Hills area to actually try and see some Ring Ouzel this time as these birds had been present for a couple of days and happily they were quickly found once I parked up at the correct spot, thankfully bagging me a full-blown life tick! Yes, this really does highlight my status as a birding novice but somehow I'd just never seen one before! Last spring in the days before blogger I visited Beacon Hill twice and Burrough Hill a few times specifically on the hunt for them but never got lucky and saw one. Other current "bogey" birds you may wish to poke fun at me about also include any Skua, Corncrake, Lesser pecker, Montys Harrier, Wood Warbler and most species of Petrel!
Oops I've been waffling, back to the bad bit. The bad bit refers to the attempts at photographing Ring Ouzel using a smart phone at a considerable range. Undeterred, the Galaxy SII was cranked up to a beefy 4x zoom and bagged this delightful image:

I think I should at least get a bonus point for getting all three in the same shot...plus a blackbird for comparison, like.

And the ugly:
No, no, no, this doesn't refer to the arrival of John Hague who briefly joined me watching the Ouzels, it refers to the attempt at photographing one of the three Wheatear that were also present in the same spot as the Ouzels. You might want to shield your eyes....

Aaaaargh my eyes, it burns, it burns!

Spot the owl breadbins*

Whilst I waste time before my dentist appointment (toothache sucks) a game of Spot the Owl is in order! This one I must admit is a tad harder than usual but should still be relatively simple for you hardened birders to find!

On a side note it seems blogger didn't like my post from yesterday and has refused to acknowledge it on anyone elses blog roll...........blogger I hate you .........I don't really, blogger gave me the stats page and for that I am eternally thankful!

And as I've been sat typing this post look what turned up on the feeders!

Male Pecker!

Hopefully this will appear on blog rolls so the vial of smallpox I sent to blogger HQ will be made redundant............

EDIT: its all fucking go in the garden today! After yesterdays complaint a Coal Tit showed up but now standby for the best photo of a Goldcrest ever!
Ready? Holding on? Arms and legs inside the vehicle? Clean change of pants? Good, we may begin....

Garden rare bush - its unrelenting

DOUBLE EDIT: Managed a slightly better photo of the crest. Enjoy

*Breadbin - a play on the word bretheren. coz im down with street slang cha know

Update

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last week or so, many non-bird related things have got in the way such as turning 25 and a 3 day jaunt down to Bristol this weekend for my mate Rory's stag do. The fellow stags are a great bunch of lads but quite frankly couldn't give a toss about birdwatching (whilst hovercraft racing yesterday I pointed out a red kite being mobbed by corvids and was widely ridiculed) so not much birding was done but I did manage a couple of hours of "skywatching" from the lofty position of the 15th floor of the fine establishment that is Premier Inn. A couple of Peregrine sightings were rewards for my effort - and by effort I mean lying in bed with a spanking headache staring out of the conveniently positioned window.

In the evening I attempted to go out for an Owl and found a likely looking spot where I might get some good advice on where to go but was sadly mistaken....

Anyway, lets get back to talking about actual birds back in the mighty Leicestershire! By the way did anyone else see the Peregrine sitting in the rafters on the television coverage of the City vs Derby game? I had a season ticket there for a number of seasons and never saw a hint of one! I didn't tend to spend much time looking upwards mind unless it was to ask the almighty why o' why was Trevor Benjamin getting into the team.

About a week ago I had a garden tick in the form of a Willow Warbler that admittedly had me convinced it was a chiffchaff (as it was nearing the end of September and is generally quite late for a willow) but after getting a good shufty at it all signs pointed at Willow and although my warbler identification skills are severly lacking im competent with the commoner species and it just felt like one rather than a chiff. Not that I would have minded it being a chiff, that would have been a garden tick too! Two Goldcrest were also present in the garden at the same time which were the first actually seen within the confines of the garden this autumn.

garden rare bush scores again!

The Greenfinch numbers in the garden are at their highest for a number of years at the moment (a flock of around 20-30 birds is regular) which bodes well for Siskin sightings this winter - the drop in Greenfinch numbers in the garden over the last few years has coincided with the number of Siskin sightings also falling. I thought i'd take a few shots of the Greenfinch and found a couple of surprises - in both the images below keen eyed readers will see the adult birds have been ringed, I don't know of any ringing activity in the immediate area of here (except perhaps intermittedly at Narborough Bog) so I wonder where they came from!? Secondly the bird in the second image has extremely dilated pupils - a feature I've never seen and makes me wonder whether the bird has an illness/infection of some kind. I believe the reddish substance around its beak isn't blood, but rather the juice of blackberries.

In terms of my Owling I've not been out as much as I'd like to but managed to meet up with Paul one evening last week where we pootled around visiting a few of the sites that we mutually know about and discussed the favoured subject - owls. In our travels we may have stumbled across a couple of new owl sites for Paul that if confirmed (we only heard the birds, didn't get a visual sighting) will take him over the magic 200 mark in terms of Owl sites that he has found. Considering Leicestershire had about 20 known sites before he commenced his work its fairly safe to say that he's done fucking well so far!
The evening after I nipped out briefly in the hope of a quick birthday owl before I went to the pub and picked up 3 of the juveniles at Pauls star site which were spread out far and wide which sadly suggests the days of sticking your head over a hedge and seeing 4-5 owls all neatly lined up for you to look at are sadly numbered!

No new photos of owls unfortunately (I aim to remedy this this week) but I did manage a photo of the extraordinarily rare and extremely elusive Three Legged Buzzard:

and this shittograph of two juvenile Linnet that I tried my hardest to string into Corn Bunting but thankfully common sense prevailed and the correct (I hope!) identification was achieved.

Corn Linnets

Crests

Up until around two months ago I always thought we only got Goldcrests in the garden during passage times - they can often be seen or heard singing in surrounding gardens during the Autumn and Spring passage. But this summer I've been hearing a bird singing from a few gardens up on several occasions and came to the conclusion that they must be resident! But where, that was the question. I found the answer to this pondering this morning when I walked up to the end of my road and along a footpath that links up with the estate behind the row of houses that I live in. The path runs parallel to the motorway and is separated from the noisy, pollution ridden road by a wedge of coniferous woodland (presumably planted to give the residents of my street some respite from the motorway noise - it doesnt work) and it was here I located what appeared to be a family party of 5 goldcrests! Boom! And also a wren. Boom! This does appear to be where they've bred and possibly explains why I only normally hear them intermittedly - because the area I found them is well out of earshot of the house they presumably only venture down the row of gardens far enough for me to hear them occasionally.
What was satisfying about this venture was that I hadn't even considered finding them there today, I'd wandered up there in the hope of possibly finding a warbler or two (failed miserably on that count) and with the intention of investigating the state of the den/treehouse that me and a neighbour had constructed in the woodland about 15 years ago! The "den" was in a right state and had appeared to have housed a tramp in the intervening years since my last visit! Either that or the foxes round here have taken to using cans of red stripe as bedding! Didnt even attempt the treehouse, it was unstable at the best of times and 15 years of rot would surely have meant total and complete death if I had climbed it. It's still standing though, I put that down to the superior building skills of two 9 year olds!
The visit did end up pissing me right off though, the footpath is almost never used anymore (the new housing estate on Queens Drive meant it was easier to use the footbridge that crosses the motorway further along) and as a result is terribly overgrown and cannot be classed as a footpath anymore. Or even a path for that matter. Now this wouldn't normally annoy me as im aware the footpath isn't used like it once was and I do take enjoyment in having to forge my own route through thick growth but what did piss me off was the amount of dumped waste down there. It was nearly all garden waste which I suppose is the best sort of dumped waste because it will at least decompose eventually but it still annoyed me. And this is why. I have my suspicions that all of it was dumped by the two houses closest to the footpath (there was a large amount of pampas grass cuttings, and who is the only one on the street with pampas grass? two from the end, thats who!) and this just strikes me as pure cunting laziness.
Blaby recycling centre is a 5 minute (probably less) drive away, infact you would be hard pushed to be closer to a suitable waste collection center and at this time of year it has a phenomenal area available for garden waste. So my neighbours decision to barrow his waste from his house to dump it on the nearby footpath probably spent more effort than if he had just taken it to the fucking tip in the first place!
And besides, even if they couldnt be arsed to take it to the tip, the local council will gladly rent you a garden waste bin if required and although yes, a small fee is required which works out at about £1.50 a month those fuckers in their 400k houses can surely afford it.
And even if you are tight and lazy theres a 3rd solution! Have a fucking compost heap in your fucking garden! The houses on this road all have pretty big gardens as gardens go (about 100m long) and each and every one has more than enough space for a compost heap. We have 3!

........Ah I feel better now, rant on here done and rant to the council sent.

Now for yesterday.....
As previously claimed, I did not drag myself out of bed early on Saturday morning to go to Rutland. I dragged myself out on saturday afternoon down to Jubilee park instead because there was definately going to be more interesting passage waders down there as opposed to that tiny pond in Rutland. Shockingly there wasnt. A hour down there produced a whopping 300+ Canada Geese (you know things are bad when you start counting them), a similar amount of Corvids, 4 Stock doves, 18 Lapwing, 2 whole tufted ducks, a mallard and a swan around the small lake. Wandering around aimlessly produced Song Thrush, GSW, singular Reed warbler and Blackcap, and a patch tick Skylark! Get in theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere. Yes thats how shit my patch is, skylarks are mega! Now I think on it I havent compiled a proper patch list. Must do that.
Still no Kingfisher here this year, will be the first year since I started fishing there in the mid 90's that I havn't seen one. On a slightly more positive note I havent seen any signal crayfish in the river this year either. Last year, particularly around the confluence with the Sence there were hundreds of the buggers!

Fish species seen yesterday:
Chub (one large individual that must have been pushing 4lb, cracking size for a summer chub)
Perch
Roach
Dace
Gudgeon (large shoal in the "beach" swim)
Minnow
3 Spined Stickleback (two at the confluence)