About Two Owls

Thursday 2 January 2014

Wet New Years Days Birding


New Year’s Day 2014

Every New Year’s Day we look forward to our Bird Boat trip round Poole Harbour courtesy of Mark and Mo.  A great way to start our birding list for the new year, chatting with our birding friends, sharing our birds and partaking in a wonderful lunch on board.  However, with a gale force wind and driving rain it was just too much this New Year’s Day meant the boat never left Poole Quay this time.  So it was a good social occasion and having our lunch at Storm restaurant instead.  

It didn’t mean we missed out on birding, early we looked over Baiter Park, with a high tide and stormy weather there were large numbers of Brent Geese and Oystercatchers, also Dunlin, a few Common Redshank, a handful of Turnstone and Black-tailed Godwits.  We popped back at the end of the day and we had the 1st winter Little Gull.

After our lunch we went up to Avon Causeway to look for the Green-winged Teal without success, however there were plenty of Lapwings, Wigeon, Teal on the flooded areas.  We went up to Blashford Lakes reserve, en-route we came across a flock of Fieldfare in Ringwood.   At Blashford the Tern Hide car park was far too flooded for us to proceed but parking by the visitor centre was dry.  We were also able to “tick off” several woodland species including Song Thrush, Jay, Green Woodpecker and tit flocks that included Coal Tit and a wintering Chiffchaff.  Over at the very flooded Ibsley Water Meadows we found the single Bewick’s Swan.

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