I was back at Rutland Water
today to help with monthly WeBS count and while waiting at the cottage for the
counters to assemble a Common Sandpiper was seen in the fishponds and two
Nuthatches on the dead tree.
The plan was for Erik and I to
count south arm three and then join Terry and help him complete lagoons two,
three and four and possibly one. It was
fairly quiet in the south arm and it didn’t take too long for us to complete,
with the highlight being six Goldeneye.
Terry’s car was parked near
the path to Shoveler hide and after parking we went to the hide to find he had
already counted lagoon four and fortunately there wasn’t as many birds on
lagoon three as yesterday and he had done a fair bit of lagoon three as
well. We had almost finished when more
Tufted Ducks started to drop in and they looked as though they were coming out
of the north arm. I called Lloyd to see
if we needed to include them as he was counting the north arm with Tim
Mac. He indicated that he was about half
way through counting several thousand Tufted Duck but those now dropping in to
lagoon three were not included and we therefore needed to add them. Terry tried to estimate them but Erik decided
he would recount them and it turned out there more than we anticipated and
there were over a 1000. There were three
Green Sandpipers to the left of the hide and I briefly saw a Snipe in
flight. A Kingfisher also flew by the
hide and in the reeds just in front we saw a couple of Chiffchaffs, a Sedge
Warbler and at least two Reed Warblers.
Terry went to Buzzard hide on
lagoon three to check if we had missed anything behind the islands, whilst Erik
and I continued on to Lapwing hide. We
called briefly at crake hide and added a Little Grebe and a few Moorhen to the
south arm count before reaching Lapwing hide.
From Lapwing hide the aim was to view lagoon two but when we entered the
hide there was a feeding flock close to the hide and when I opened the end flap
I was able to see quite a large party of passerines moving through that
included three Chiffchaffs and two Blackcaps.
The Great White Egret was on the lagoon and there was a Ruff, three
Green Sandpiper and two Greenshanks feeding around the edges of the lagoon and
a second Kingfisher was also observed.
Satisfied we had counted all we could from Lapwing we moved onto
Redshank hide to view and area not visible from Lapwing. We added a few birds to the count and then
went to the Bird Watching Centre and as we were first back we set about
counting lagoon one. There were plenty
of birds on the lagoon mainly Gadwall and Coot but also Mute Swan, Teal,
Mallard, Shoveler and a single Pintail and two Red-crested Pochard and there
was also a Ruff and Black-tailed Godwit.
We were thinking about moving to either Snipe or harrier hide to count
and area not visible from the centre when a microlight flew over and disturbed
everything. Most birds did appear to
come back down onto lagoon one but some clearly didn’t and we decided that
rather than count the lagoon again we would be better sticking with what we had
already counted.
Initial feedback from the
count suggested that there was over 7000 Tufted Duck on site and also record
numbers of both Greylag and Canada Geese.
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