PATCH DIARY
Weedon's World
Having had a pretty quiet late summer and early autumn, Mike took to local ‘land birding’ for a change of scene
Don’t ask how the old year list is going. After all, I will only go and tell you. And it is a sad tale of woe, with very little in the way of change for too long. As you may be aware, I have kept a spreadsheet of my Peterborough area year lists since 2003. Mostly, I get a score in the mid to late 180s. Between 2018 and 2021 I scored into the 190s. The year 2015 was bad. The pattern goes thus, 2014: 187, 2015: 173, 2016: 188.
The nadir of 2015 is something of a mystery, especially as that year we had such great birds as Glaucous Gull, Rough-legged Buzzard, Red-rumped Swallow, Long-tailed Duck and Pied Flycatcher, locally.
As I write in mid-September, my 2023 total is stuck on 177 (the most recent addition being a Curlew on 27 August). You may be saying, there are still three and a half months to go, what is he whingeing about, the big baby? And I see your point. But, one thing I have learned over two decades of local birding, is that the bulk of action happens in the spring, with autumns and second winter periods providing feeble. So, I have sort of given up on a decent year list this year. Sort of.
For the last month or so I have resorted to ‘land-birding’ with the primary aim of adding a migrant Tree Pipit to my 2023 list. We are spoiled around Peterborough with a preponderance of gravel pits, lakes and wetlands. Such sites deliver a very nice array of birds almost on a plate to local birders, for minimum effort.
This is a world away from where I cut my birding teeth, in the wooded downland of Surrey’s North Downs on the southern outskirts of the London Borough of Croydon. There was no water, so we made do with woodland, scrubland and grassland birds. One of my favourite birdwatching ‘techniques’ was to find a fallen trunk and sit still in the woods waiting for birds come to me. I fondly remember, as a lad, watching Nuthatches adding mud to their nest hole entrance, and a Blackcap coming almost to touching distance to belt out its fluty song. Those woods were so familiar, I knew exactly where to expect Bullfinches, or Marsh Tits, Whitethroats etc.
This late summer I’ve reverted to the ways of my youth, and spurned the wetlands and pits for birds of ‘dry land’. Castor Hanglands (that local poet John Clare called Ailsworth Heath) has been my sunrise destination before work. I have been concentrating on the open, tall grassland clearings and their surrounds, which each morning come awake with Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps, Whitethroats, Lesser Whitethroats and growing flocks of Goldfinches. Most days, I’ve encountered the Castor Hanglands specialities: Bullfinch, Marsh Tit, Jay, Treecreeper and woodpeckers, each in their place as expected. Occasionally, a Raven will pass over, or a Hobby. On 23 August, a calling Redst
