Recent evenings have seen the return of the starlings to Blashford, with a murmuration of perhaps 30000 birds. They are mostly arriving from the north and west, perhaps because this is where there are pastures and urban centres for them to feed in during the day. The best place to view them is from the bank at the south side of the main car park, although it can be very cold up there if the evening is breezy. How much they fly about depends upon conditions and predators, so the spectacle can vary widely from one day to the next. At present they are roosting just to the west of Ibsley Water, but they may well move if the reeds start to get beaten down by the weight of birds.
Starlings murmuration by Cathryn Baldock
The gull roost remains as an additional spectacle with perhaps 8-10,000 birds.
This evening I was helping out with the Solent wader and brent survey work, I was rather late to the field as I had a meeting in the middle of the day, but I ended up at Lepe in good time for a really spectacular sunset.
Lepe sunset
I also saw a few brent geese flying north across the Solent, they appear to be roosting in the Beaulieu River and feeding on the north side of the Isle of Wight in the day. This is the first winter I have observed regular cross-Solent movement by brent geese. These observations are being collected to help understanding of how the birds are using the resources around the Solent. If we are to conserve them we need to know how they are using the habitat and how different sites are linked.
The brent geese come to winter with us from Arctic Siberia, staging in Holland and Germany en route to and from. Perhaps surprisingly the starlings are also long distance travellers and some of them may also have come all the way from Russia to winter with us.
Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve 