19th September – Sightings

A windy day with occasional showers and a lot of cloud. Iblsey Water hosted hundreds of hirundines all day, in contrast to yesterday, when almost all were house martin, today there were good numbers of swallow with quite a few sand martin as well, in a quick estimate first thing I came up with about 400-500 swallow and perhaps 200 sand martin low over the water and closest to Tern hide, with about 500 house martin, mostly towards the north and as is usually the case higher up in the sky. I searched the higher house martin for a late swift, but without success.

The edges of the car park held at least 5 chiffchaff and it was my impression that there were many more about today generally. I was mostly stuck in meetings for the rest of the day sop I have relied upon “reports received” for the rest. Over Ibsley Water single hobby, peregrine and a passing female type marsh harrier were seen as was a fly over cattle egret, I still have yet to see one at Blashford! A single great white egret spent the day on the lake amongst the crowd of grey heron. The juvenile black tern remained in place for its fifth day.

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Black and Yellow

A quick update only today. Today at last saw us get our first black tern of the autumn, sadly they only stayed a few minutes and I missed them but a group of four is good and hopefully there will be more to come. When I have opened the Tern hide the last couple of days there have been lots of wagtails, mostly pied but yesterday 3 and today 4 yellow wagtail, not common birds here. The osprey from the weekend has been seen everyday until today, and I suspect that it was the “large bird” seen by a visitor to the west of Ibsley Water that flushed lots of grey heron, so I am pretty sure it is still around.

Hopefully more to report tomorrow.