Birds reported in the hide log books today:
Ibsley Water: grey plover, ruddy duck 2, goldeneye female, great white egret
Ivy lake: great white egret, water rail 2
Woodland Hide area: c.60 siskin feeding high in tops of alders
The grey plover is an excellent record for Blashford Lakes, hopefully it’ll be there tomorrow so I can see it.
Today saw Adam and I in flurry of chainsawing and strimming activity, coppicing some leaning willows by various footpaths and strimming back rush and brambles to create winter feeding areas for wigeon and lapwing. So not much wildlife seen by us other than a large buck fallow deer by the goosander hide.
A massive thank you to genius wildlife photographer Noel for sending us these fantastic photos taken on the reserve earlier this week. They pretty much blow all the recent pictures on this blog right out of the water!
Ibsley Water sunset
Old faithful Walter White, our autumn returning great white egret and mallard friends.
Great white Walter White egret
A hat-trick of herons, from the northern screen on the Rockford track.
Little egret in flight
Grey heron in flight. Checkout the primary feathers on this bad boy. A fantastic photograph!
If you’re interested you can checkout more of Noel’s amazing work here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/n031/
On Monday we will hopefully have a contractor working on the Goosander Hide and in front of the Tern hide so if you’re visiting the reserve, you’ll be better off going to the other hides first.
Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve 