Thursday 28th December

A long lapse has been brought on by an outburst of househunting and so no nature activity.  The one thing I did notice was a casual visit to the garden by a wren.  I'm sure this must have happened before at some point but I can't remember the last time I saw one there.

But yesterday I needed to get some fresh air after Christmas and set off to Mersehead following a couple of reports of bramblings in the area, notably on the feeders at the Visitor's Centre which seemed a good idea on a chilly day.

Greenfinches

I duly arrived and found a profusion of birds around the feeders, the first being a yellowhammer that was not to reappear later.  It was nice to see a couple of tree sparrows quite quickly too. The low, bright sunlight made it difficult to see colour and I at first thought there were some bright, small birds that might be of some note. The photos showed some birds obviously had a yellowish tinge and on finally using the binoculars I could see that they were female greenfinches and almost all the others were tree sparrows.

This was in itself interesting as I would never have expected the scene to be dominated by these two species and have never seen either bird in such large numbers.  There were some tits, dunnocks and blackbirds plus a fair few chaffinches but at times every second bird was a tree sparrow or a greenfinch.  It also seemed to me that the female greenfinches were a bit smaller than the males, something I hadn't observed before.

Meanwhile I scanned the chaffinches for anything that looked a bit different, i.e. a brambling but no brambling did appear.

After some time I set off for a wander towards the hides.  Apart from the barnacles, various flocks of which were honking all around the pace, there was a big cluster of birds motionless in one of the bushes on the path to Bruaich Hide.

Linnet

Again the light was difficult but I took them to be linnets.  They sat motionless as I gradually approached as if saving their energy on such a cold day.  In the end they did reluctantly fly off apart from one, presumably their PR Officer who stayed on his/her perch and allowed me to get a close up. 

Apart from that there was precious little to be sighted in the distance on the wetlands and I was having a bit of trouble focussing my binoculars, which got steamed up with the change of temperature on leaving the visitor's centre.

So I decided on a yomp across the beach before returning to the feeders just before dusk.  It was all very enjoyable in the sunshine, very still and quiet but again nothing to be seen (apart from a single heron over the wetland).  The reason in my view was that the tide was extremely far out, and so all the waders, birds of prey etc. move out with it.

Mersehead - very pretty, but no birds in sight!

At the end of the day I spent a good hour watching the feeders until the sun started to disappear.  Still no brambling...