Brent Res Jan 2nd
Firstly, a quicl update on yesterday. I omitted Teal from my list so I actually finished the day on 57 species which is pretty respectable. Today was always going to be much tougher. With most of the commoner ticks out of the way, it was down to searching for the elusive ones or hoping something good flew over. Like a Lapwing. It didn't. In fact, nothing flew over at all. Well, OK, that's not quite true, we saw the Little Egret fly in and drop behind the dam again but that was it. What happened to that cold weather movement? There was a light dusting of snow overnight and half of the northern reservoir had frozen over so it was cold enough to get things moving.
Still, at least I could be content with the two year ticks I did manage, even i…
Brent Res Jan 1st
Just back from almost six hours birding up the res. I set myself a target of 50 species for the day to start off the 2010 patchlistlist competition and comfortably beat that with 56 species. The first bird of the day was a gull flying around before dawn and although I suspected it was a Black-headed Gull I decided not to start the year off with a string! So it was a Crow a few minutes later that kicked the yearlist off. As I left the house in slightly better light (but still pre-dawn) I saw a real Black-headed Gull and followed this up with a few more common species but not the Robin I was expecting. They must have had a late night as I didn't get one until species number 7. I already had 11 species before arriving at the reservoir at 08.0…
Brent Res Yearlist
I thought I'd start a new blog for 2010 about my birding at Brent, based loosly on my efforts in the Patchlist Competition. 2009 has been a great year for me - and Brent (more of that later). As there's only a few hours of daylight left it's fair to say I'm going to finish on 135 species which gives me the runner-up spot in the competition. As the fat yellow man says "Woo-hoo!"
That's not only my highest yearlist at Brent but also the all time highest list by any single observer, not bad considering the reservoir has been around over 170 years! In some ways it's been a strange achievement - great because I got to see all (well almost - I dipped two Whinchats!) the common and scarcer birds during the year but also failed to see a single rari…