Being a land-locked county, Oxfordshire isn't normally blessed with a plethora of rare birds. While places such as Norfolk, Cornwall & Shetland bask in heaps of top draw national rares, here in Oxon we have to be content with more modest fare. From past experience, good county birdage tends to go in fits and starts with some years producing nothing of real note at all while other years have rich pickings. This year there has been nothing of national import within the county apart from maybe the near miss with the Berkshire Booted Eagle that was seen in south east Oxon briefly on a couple of occasions. Still there have been a couple of decent "supporting cast" birds that have been interesting enough to tempt me away from my local patch.
The first of these was a pair of Velvet Scoters that turned up in the unlikely location of Grimsbury Reservoir up in the north of the county in Banbury. As this wasn't a county tick for me, having seen one at Farmoor Reservoir back in December 2013 I didn't drop everything to go and see it. I was very much expecting them to depart overnight but when they lingered for several days I decided to go and pay a visit. After all, the reservoir is pretty small so the views should be pretty good. So it was on a rather murky Saturday morning I pulled up in the car park and headed off to see them. Predictably, I picked the wrong bank to view from to start with and spotted them right on the opposite bank half way along the shore. So I had to walk all the way around, stopping for a brief look at a Dunlin that was posing nicely along the shore.
It was a shame that conditions were so murky. That and the fact that there was a wire netting fence in the way meant that conditions were far from ideal for my superzoom camera but the photos came out passably enough. Certainly these were far far better views of this species than I'd had earlier in the year when I was at Musselburgh dipping the Stejneger's Scoter.
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| Above and below, the two Velvet Scoter |
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| The confiding Dunlin |
The two Velvet Scoter ended up staying 13 days in total, an amazing record for an inland county such as ours.
The second good bird of note happened on Thursday when, just after 2pm news dropped of a Snow Bunting on Farmoor causeway. Now, I'd half jokingly predicted to TM that we would have one this month. This was largely based on the fact that my only county sighting hitherto happened in this month at Farmoor back in 2009.
With nothing else to do that afternoon I decided to go and twitch it and so battled through the traffic (and a closed-off slip road that warranted a detour up through Cumnor) to arrive at Farmoor just after 2:50pm. There had been no news of the bird since the initial report so I wasn't sure if I was going to have to refind it myself. I met up with BS and we started searching along the causeway together until we got news that it was still present at the far western end of the causeway. We hurried on to find it feeding happily on the main causeway road being watched by just a handful of county locals.
By going down onto the reservoir edge and peering up over the wave wall it was possible to get nice close views of what is usually a pretty confiding species anyway. I love Snow Buntings - they are very attractive and appealing birds that are always a pleasure to see. I remembered that earlier in the year I had been watching a family party up on the summit of Cairn Gorm - very different surroundings from today! I took some photos with my superzoom but in the gloom in the end I opted to take some video footage, balancing the camera on the wave wall in order to try to keep it steady.
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| The Snow Bunting |
and some video footage
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| Oxon's finest (and me) paying homage to the Snow Bunt, courtesy of Thomas Miller |
After while it was starting to get dark so and we all started to leave. As the reservoir café was still open we ended up have a cup of tea and a good natter about all things birding. It had been a very pleasant local twitch.
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