THE starlings were wonderful tonight at Ham Wall RSPB reserve in Somerset - there were thousands and thousands, but they were generally far off, in small groups or elsewhere!
That did not stop us enjoying the calm, bright and cold evening along with many others. As usual nature was not predictable...there were no tight massing of birds - as they flew in a settled quickly, so these images are just to get a sense of the place and the scale of the flocks:
WE'VE been away! We went to NZ for 18 days with a stop over in Hong Kong; needless to say we had a fabulous time in both places. There was more opportunity to see wildlife in NZ, as we spent most of our time in the city in HK.
NZ is either farming or wild country (plus towns and a few cities of course). It has wonderful, huge and empty beaches, great glacial lakes and mountains, rolling pasture, wild rivers (some out of glaciers) and air so clear and clean its hard to believe. The oceans around it are teaming with big wildlife - whales, dolphins, seals and seal-lions, loads of fabulous pelagic birds, to name but a few.
In no particular order I'll post somes images - starting with the very photogenic nesting gannets at Muriwai on the coast, west of Auckland; they are such characters. Most were sitting on eggs, but a handful of chicks had hatched and looked little helpless, fluffy reptiles that had been sat on!
Unfortunately the successfulness of the gannets has been at the expense of the terns which have been pushed onto small sloping areas and whose numbers have recently dropped.
The introduced starlings have developed a taste for the nectar of the New Zealand flax flowers.
The yellow hammer seems to have less brown on the head than ours, but is an introduced species too.
THE water level was petty high on the Catcott Lows on the Somerset Levels today - this meant that ducks and birds of prey were plentiful, but there were very few waders.
Along with at least one great white egret, were 3 or 4 marsh harriers regularly quartering the reserve, and a peregrine zooming around all the time that I was there (~2 hrs). One of the harriers had a green tag on its wing and apparently is a female from Suffolk.
In front the the hide a pair of stonechats came very close and gave us great views. (Click on the photos to enlarge and view as a slide show).
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| Female stonechat |
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| Male stonechat |
On the drive to the reserve through the narrow lanes bordered by rhynes, the damp fields were playing host to lots of winter thrushes and starlings.
I also managed to capture a quick snap of snipe overhead:
Although cool and blustery it was quite a good day, with other highlights including a chiff-chaff, big flocks of starlings, a kingfisher and a trip to Aldi for some stollen!
