2nd November. Love On The Rocks

With the apparent end of autumn and travelling to and from work in the dark, with absolutely no chance of any mid-week birding I'm suffering a bit with can't be arsed syndrome - certainly as far as blogging goes.  Lots of posts in my head, just too knackered to write them up in the evenings.  

In general it's been pretty quiet on the patch, though a few highlights have brightened things up.

The gull roost produced 3 Caspian Gulls last Saturday(27th) with a cracking 2nd winter bird quite possibly one of the nicest looking gulls I've seen - and I genuinely mean that...

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The previous weekends gull roost produced a side show 3 Short-eared Owls hunting the southern plains, the first to stick around since the site officially opened.  Unfortunately UK Coal are currently cutting all the grass, though having spoken with them about the owls I'm hopeful that they'll leave a decent sized patch uncut.

A calling flyover Snow Bunting on the 28th was frustrating and came during a good movement of thrushes, pipits, skylarks and an obvious influx of Reed Buntings.  

A full six hours trudging around this morning produced nothing of note, apart from 2 SEO's flushed by the grass cutter.  On my way back for the bus I took a diversion past the boulder pile. A dog walker was coming away from the rocks so I wasn't hopeful of seeing anything in there, a chat flicked up and perched on the outermost rocks - and instantly made my six hours of nothingness vanish - it was only a bloody Black Redstart, not only that it was perched on the rocks that I anticipate seeing a Black Redstart on every time I walk past them. It instantly flew off and I spent the next hour trying to re-find it. Typically as I was again heading for the next bus I found it on another rock pile where it vanished again, quite possibly the most elusive Black Red' that I've ever seen. It reappeared on the original rocks but never gave itself for the camera. Yet another patch tick for me (one previous record from 2009) taking the self-found year list to 137  , with still a few 'easy' species to get140 or higher is certainly looking plausible.

As good as it got!!