Saturday 20th February

We went into a prolonged cold snap that produced heavy snow, the last of which lingered until the middle of this week.  For around ten days, I only managed short walks around the village or in the woods. 

This wasn't much good for birdwatching beyond enticing the red kites to show themselves closer to the village than normal.  When I finally did manage a bike ride (which was almost ended by encountering a car stuck on a side road) a couple of buzzards were seen hanging around close to farms as well as a bullfinch in a hedgerow.

Since the snow cleared it has felt distinctly like the run-in to Spring and I did manage to achieve one minor target.

For a while I've been trying to get a photo of the group long-tailed tits that occasionally make a quick raid on the feeders in the garden without success.  The other day I tried video with better results:

On a first garden tidy up of the year I noticed the first flowers of the season - a small bunch of crocuses.

Sunday 7th February

Quite an interesting last ten days in a phase where continuing harsh weather has restricted activities to a large extent.

The last walk I undertook in Chopwell Woods revealed only a red kite en route and a sole buzzard on the way out.  Since then the paths have become so muddy that I've restricted myself to walks around the village, seeing just a few goldfinches and sparrows.

What particularly enlivened things was the appearance of eight or ten new little brown jobs at the back of the garden while I was getting dressed on Friday 29th, some venturing into the garden itself.  Having quickly dismissed sparrow and chaffinch as possibilities, I thought I caught a flash of red and wondered about redpoll.  

Once downstairs I could see some flecked breasts and yellow beaks through the binoculars and loosely considered twite.  As numbers decreased I managed to get a few hurried shots with the camera which conclusively proved they were indeed redpoll.

Redpolls

The last couple of years the Big Garden Bird Watch has brought disappointing results so it was pleasing that a couple of redpolls turned up in the trees at the appropriate time and the session was further enhanced by the appearance of a nuthatch and a better selection of tits than normal. 

Then on the Monday of this week, there were at least twenty redpolls systematically working their way through the birches behind the fence, but annoyingly a bit too distant and obscured to get a decent shot of them.  There were a few more on the Tuesday and then no more, the supply of birch seeds having presumably been exhausted.

During this time my attention turned to wondering whether they were lesser or common redpolls.  It appears that some commentators argue that the lesser redpoll is no longer recognised as a separate species, but this has been gainsayed by most authorities somewhat to my disappointment as I don't feel competent to distinguish between the two.  However, various other members of our Naturewatch group have had redpolls in their gardens and the consensus seems to be that there are at least some common redpolls amongst them.  So my guess is that the influx is partly down to an irruption of common redpolls from Scandinavia.

Later on on the Monday I managed an exercise bike ride, avoiding the parlous and overcrowded state of the cycle tracks and saw what I thought was a sparrowhawk but turned out to be a kestrel behaving like a sparrowhawk.  I assume the apparent white wing barring is a trick of the light.  Shortly afterwards a deer bolted across the road a few yards ahead in a state of some panic.

Kestrel