Winter County Birding Round-up

There are a few local county birding trips I've done recently that I thought I would round-up into a single post. They all involved seeing rarer county water fowl as you would expect at this time of year.

The first was a trip to Blenheim a few weeks ago to see the smart adult drake Ring-necked Duck. It was associating with a large flock of Pochard though would go missing when the flock was flushed by fishermen in boats on the the lake so there was an element of jeopardy to twitching it. Fortunately I picked a good day where it had already been reported and was able to enjoy what used to be quite a county rarity back in the day. In recent years there have been quite a few of them so their county status is not what it used to be. There was also a nice flock of 20 or so Crossbills in a nearby plantation that I picked up on the way back to the car. All in all a very nice afternoon out!

The Ring-necked Duck with some Pochard companions courtesy of Gareth Cashburn

The Blenheim Crossbills courtesy of Kyle Smith

I was away over Christmas so wasn't able to get in on the hot goose action until a couple of days ago. A trip on Sunday afternoon down to Otmoor for the Bean Geese proved rewarding in the end though to start with it looked like I was going to dip. Viewing from the Noke end. there were 50+ White-fronted Geese on Ashgrave which were lovely to see but the Beans were no where to be seen. Suddenly at just before 3pm all 19 of them flew in and landed on the pond in the middle of the field. There they sat, preened and squabbled happily for about 40 minutes before flying off again.

 

Some superb video footage courtesy of Jason Coppock 

 

..and photo courtesy of Jeremy Dexter

The last trip was on New Year's Eve itself when I popped over to Farmoor to enjoy the winter sunshine on a cold, crisp day. The target was a a female-type Common Scoter which had turned up a couple of days ago. I found it hunting actively in the middle of F1. I couldn't turn up the Greater Scaup that was also supposed to be about but as I'd seen one at the start of the year, I wasn't so bothered.

The Common Scoter, courtesy of Ben Sheldon