Sunday 3 November 2013

A day's birding in Leicestershire and Rutland - November 2, 2013

Roger and I started off at Newton Harcourt Church where we had a Coal Tit, two Nuthatches and a Treecreeper.  A Red Kite was observed just east of Blaston as we made our way to Eye Brook Reservoir.

It was rather misty and cold at Eye Brook Reservoir and the water level was high with no exposed mud.  There were plenty of wildfowl, which included two nice Ruddy Shelduck, but we couldn’t find anything else of note.  We did find fourteen Snipe feeding in the grassy margins and there were three Little Egrets but the mist was making it difficult to identify the more distant wildfowl.

We visited the north arm at Rutland Water first where we soon located the three Black-necked Grebes and six male and three female Red-crested Pochard.  The ten Barnacle Geese were on the northern shore but we could only find four Egyptian Geese, which have been quite numerous here recently.  There were masses of wildfowl, which were mainly Wigeon but there were also reasonable numbers of Gadwall, Teal, Mallard and Tufted Duck but I could only find a single Goldeneye.  There were two Little Egrets on the shore, a single Buzzard was observed over Burley Wood and a Redshank flew by.

On reaching the Egleton Reserve we had a quick look at the feeding station, where I saw a single Marsh Tit but there were very few birds visiting the feeders.  A quick view of lagoon one before lunch produced very little, twelve Pintail and five Little Egrets being the best.

After lunch we walked to shoveler hide on lagoon three seeing three Redwing on route but very little else.  On arriving in shoveler hide we found another male and two female Red-crested Pochard and I counted fourteen Pintail but there were far fewer wildfowl on the lagoon today.  There was no sign of the recent Scaup and the Tufted Duck number appeared to be well down, which was also reflected in the north arm.  A third-winter Yellow-legged Gull was observed flying over the bund between lagoon three and south arm three amongst a party of Black-headed Gulls.

A visit to crake hide produced another Redshank and better views of the Yellow-legged Gull and a juvenile Peregrine flew over.  It was easy to see from here how much the water levels had risen, indicating that water was now being pumped into the reservoir.  A Kingfisher flew by smew hide on lagoon two and ten more Pintail were observed.  It was pretty quiet on lagoon four and all we saw of interest from sandpiper hide was another twelve Pintail and an adult Yellow-legged Gull.

We called at both grebe and redshank hides on lagoon two on the way back to the centre but found nothing new.  From the centre I counted twenty Pintail on the lagoon and there were five Snipe on one of the islands and six Curlew were feeding on the meadow to the south.  A Sparrowhawk was observed circling above before it drifted off to the north.


It had not been an exceptional day’s birding but as usual there was a good selection of birds, although we missed a very late Sand Martin over lagoon one.

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