Little Egret
Fieldfare
Drake Goosander
A brilliant morning on the Meadows! Initially quiet when I first arrived but building very quickly to a fabulously varied and productive walk covering both north and south sections. The Chiffchaffs are now singing away with good numbers on both sections particularly around the boardwalk area. Chiffchaff are onomatopoeic (I had to look up how to spell it), their name is literally a translation of their song so whilst your wandering about, listen out, it's very distinctive. I found some wader footprints on the new scrape which I would guess had probably been made by a Common Sandpiper as we don't get too many wading birds through the area and this species is one of the more frequent visitors. Still it's exciting, didn't take them too long to find it, its only been built a week! On the Southern Section behind Fosse Park I watched a Fox hunting out in the open for about twenty minutes though trying to stalk feeding Woodpigeon was just plain daft. I guess, judging by the rather brazen attitude and hunting during late morning that their are cubs nearby. A Little Egret flew over and landed on the floodplain briefly before continuing along the Biam and I lost sight of it. I can't believe I actually hitched to North Norfolk in the early eighties and spent two days looking for my first one, nowadays thanks to global warming they seem to be everywhere, the slow but steady push north. The fields adjacent to the ring road are today alive with thrushes, an incredible sight. The numbers of Fieldfare have probably tripled in the last few days and there must be at least 150 with equal numbers of Redwing together with good numbers of resident thrushes. The walk also produced three Green Woodpecker territories, two pairs of Kingfishers and at least five pairs of Reed Bunting holding territory. The big surprise, because I thought they had already left were six Goosander which are still using the favoured pools together with a pair of Great Crested Grebe.
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