I got out on a couple more trips this week.
On Monday the U3A Nature Watchers made it to the Low Barns Reserve next to the River Wear, which looks quite promising and certainly produced several pleasant if not unexpected sightings.
Straight away we caught my first sighting this year of a swallow in the typical 'bird on a wire' pose.
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| Swallow |
Of course there were a couple of pairs of Canada Geese, one of which had some charming chicks, the other distinctly amusing in their mating activities.
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Also we found the more obvious members of the grebe family:
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I was also quite amused to spot what I take to be a pair of immature greylag geese. I think they look rather stately.
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| Greylag geese |
Then at one point, something out of the ordinary happened when a bird appeared briefly on the fence and bushes in front of the hide - and appeared to be sporting a definite red breast, Unfortunately, I had turned away briefly to check the feeders and couldn't get a photo of it. But I did see it later in flight, which was noticeably rapid and again got a clear flash of red breast. The only conclusion I could come to was that it might have been a red-breasted flycatcher, a relatively rare passage bird.
Unfortunately the only photo that someone did manage to take was inconclusive and looked more like a reed warbler and no further reports have followed.
As it happened I had to content myself with a shot of the first speckled wood butterfly I have seen settle this year.
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| Speckled Wood |
In fact there's been remarkably few of them around this year. Perhaps something to do with the cool, damp spring?
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