New Forest and Pennington

Saturday 27th January 2007


nuthatch

Weather wise it wasn’t looking too bad.   Dry and not as cold as earlier in the week, so off we headed to the coast.

Not sure how it happened but we ended up in the Arboretum at Blackwater. Butterflies were everywhere, a red admiral even landed on me.  It felt more like a spring day than a winters one.

We saw some goldcrests and a wren and later on  a few hawfinches arrived. Then we went to the other side of the woods and saw a treecreeper,nuthatch and a great spotted woodpecker, various tits and finches, robins, blackbirds and I noticed a buzzard overhead.

62. treecreeper

After our picnic lunch we headed down to Pennington to see if we could find some pintails.

We parked the car at Pennington Marshes and on the walk down to the coast we met a lady birder we have seen down there many times before.   She said she  was on the look out for some Ruffs. She thought  we would probably see a Kingfisher down on the lagoons now that most of the people had gone home. She also said we would see some pintails.

She wasn’t wrong, within five minutes we had seen some pintails and two kingfishers! We also saw the Slavonian Grebe she said was  close to the shore.

Two female Red Breasted Mergansers were on the lagoon and a Kingfisher came along and seemed to bump into one of them. Could the Kingfisher have been taking a fish from the Red Breasted Merganser?? I’m not quite sure what happened there.

There were more surprises to come though.... five spotted redshanks and one greenshank, fairly rare this time of the year I would think.

Then on the way home I noticed some daffodils in Lymington, the first ones I have seen this year.


63. pintail
64. kingfisher
65. slavonian grebe
66. greenshank
67. spotted redshank
68. red-legged partridge (sowley)