Thursday 26th November

The coal tits continue to raid the bird table in numbers and the robin tries in vain to chase them off.  They are very agile and quick and flight and have become a bit of a favourite.

On Wednesday I followed the twitchers again to see if I could get a decent view of the crossbills at Rising Sun Country Park  Not knowing where they were, I followed the Brown Trail and looked out for conifers,

A slight diversion to a small pond just South of the car park revealed four or five gadwall at closer range than the ones I saw at Holywell but shortly after I met a couple of birdwatchers who said they had found the twitchers but the crossbills had disappeared.  I thought they meant permanently.

Gadwall

However I continued with Plan A, figuring that there seemed to be a good deal of conifers around so that the crossbills may just have been displaced to a slightly different area of the park.

So I walked on not seeing anything of note apart from a couple of suspected fieldfare/redwing until near the end of the path I encountered the twitchers who told me that the crossbills had been there until about three hours ago when a sparrowhawk flushed them and they hadn't been back since.

I decided to come back another day and was heading dor the car park when I saw a chap with binoculars peering into some deciduous trees at the edge of a farm field.  Sure enough it was the crossbills warily edging along the woodland border.  

Crossbill

It was a typical lucky encounter - the right bird on the wrong kind of tree in the wrong location.  Having a last minute success when I had effectively given up looking is however something that has happened to me quite a number of times now.

Yesterday we did another joint bike ride in the Mitford area.  I was just relating the story of having spotted a heron at the top of a tree and failing to photograph it when we saw a heron at the top of a tree in exactly the same place.  Once again it made off when the camera came out.  

Averaging 10.3 mph we didn't notice much more until a lot of honking near Dinnington revealed the presence of a large number of geese in a field.  I took a couple of photos to check for pink-footed geese but it seems they were all greylags.