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Great Tits
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- Mar 2008
- 9762
- Tyne 'n' Wear (emphasis on the 'n')
- Dundee Utd, Gladbach, Atleti, Napoli, New Orleans Saints, Elgin City
Even without seeking them out we’ve seen some interesting birds on our exercise outings: Holywell Dene on Sunday we watched a dipper on the river then saw an acrobatic nuthatch on some bird feeders along with the full range of tits.
Yesterday at St Mary’s island the tide had just gone in quite strongly and a huge crowd of gulls were very agitated, when we got closer we saw that a group of eider were amongst them and repeatedly jabbing at them.
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Given that we've had next to nothing in our garden/back yard since I moved up here and not for the lack of trying (apart from one blackbird), we now appear to have a pair of Dunnocks which must be nesting close by and are regular visitors each morning. They're keeping me slightly sane with everything else going on.
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I love your wren picture just up the page TrL. I was amazed to learn only recently that they're the very commonest bird in the UK – I thought I must've misheard or misinterpreted to start with, but no apparently there's about 7 million of them in this country. It's just that they're so small and shy and secretive and quick-moving, you simply don't see them most of the time like you do with robins, blackbirds, tits, corvids etc. etc. So it's terrific you managed to get such a good photo!
And glad you've added those great crested grebes and avocet to your lifetime list. Beautiful birds both. The reason I was surprised was because they're quite large and striking species, which I seem to have been stumbling across them at random in any kind of wetland-like environment as long as I can remember (e.g. in my part of South Wales called Cosmeston Lakes, where a couple of old limestone quarry pits naturally filled in with water in the 1970s and the area was consequently made into a public country park, and you only have to stroll across the bridge between the lakes to have a decent chance of spying a grebe or two out on the water), so it startled me that you could have missed them altogether previously!
It's only looking up their range now, though, that I remember how peripheral the avocet's population still is. I'm just lucky to have been going over to north Norfolk all my life, which happens to be somewhere where they're always visible, and they winter down in south Wales, so it doesn't strike me as a hard-to-see bird – but I get that this isn't the whole picture of course.
Of course, go back a few decades and it would've been a very different picture again. The avocet is, after all, the symbol of the RSPB because it was so very rare at the time they decided to use it as their logo, and it's been a real conservation success story since. Ironically it was an accident at first: they'd been extinct here for a century when the flooding of coastal marshes in the 1940s as a defence against invasion inadvertently created the habitat for them to recolonise.
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Absolutely. The Avocet was like the Red Kite in my youth as two of the Big Ticks. I did see Dartford Warblers, in the New Forest once during my brief period going on RSPB trips in my teens. Back then they were Britain’s rarest bird.
And as for the commonest, I’m surprised to learn it’s the Wren. We were always told it was the Blackbird. A pair for every garden, my Dad used to say. In fairness that was forty years ago.
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Cheers all, you're too kind. The clarity is down to the camera and lens quality, nowt to do with the bloke pressing the shutter - I've cropped all the pics to some extent, so the original composition was a lot less considered!
I think a lot of the resident birds will be banded as the Trust do a lot of work monitoring populations etc - not sure about the migratory species.
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Lady Cardinals. The men get all the glory with the lovely red colouring. But there is something really sublime about the strange grey and pale red on the females. We get a pair of them out back all the time, but I'm drawn to staring at her more than him. Don't mention that to him...I don't need trouble.
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Just spotted a tawny owl in the woods, perched on a low branch about 10m away and staring me out before it flew off slaloming through the trees . There's a few around here, but these owls are rarely seen around midday. Probably has a nest and so upping the hunting hours.
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Balderdasha nice work.
Stobart maybe you can’t be doing with them, but you’ve done really well to get a decent pic. I always found them incredibly elusive; heard but not seen. And our equivalent the Common Koel (identical in shape but glossy black) is equally hard to see, but easy to hear in spring and summer.
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