Rutland Water

Unusually we had a combination of some spare time and pleasant weather, so where to go? We decided it'd been ages since we last visited Rutland Water so we should pop in there for the morning. Lagoon IV was work in progress during our last visit. It's finished now and, though there's a lot of growing still to be done, it was very busy with birds. We just wished we'd taken our scope as a lot of the waders were quite distant, the Lagoon is huge!

We tried all three hides, the third got us nearest the flock of roosting Golden Plover. You can see them here before something spooked them and they all took to the air:

There are some Lapwing and Black-headed Gulls mixed in with the flock. There were also Lesser and Greater Black-backed Gulls, Dunlin, Oystercatchers and some other waders too distant to identify.

Here you can see the flock settling down again:

We also saw Hobby and Sparrowhawk on our walk around. At the visitor centre one of the members of staff was very kind and talked us through all of the development plans they have for various new lagoons, extended reedbeds, etc., it sounds like in two to three years time the reserve will be even better than it is now. On the basis a quick wander around the top third took us a couple of hours, visits in a few years time will be whole day events, maybe the visitor centre will have to start selling hot soup and jacket spuds!

We bought the updated tide timetable for 2010 and 2011 before heading home delighted with our morning at Rutland.

Back at home it's clean-up time in the garden. Lots of leaves are coming off of the lime trees and there's a summer's worth of growth of various weeds that needed clearing up too. The garden is now being regularly visited by Coal Tits, we only saw our first one of those around six months ago so a regular pair visiting is a real treat. The abundance of food is still bringing in over 100 birds a day, mostly House Sparrow, Blackbird, Tits, Greenfinch, Magpies, Woodpigeons, Collared Doves, etc., we do also get rarer visitors including Little Owl, Tawny Owl, Green Woodpecker, Great Spotted Woodpecker and of course all these birds attract their own hunters, this Sparrowhawk seems to be spending a lot of time hunting through the garden on a daily basis. This time she missed: