27-8-12

Twitching.  Local patch birding.  Garden birding Whatever the birding that you prefer ther is a reason for it.  I love all of the above but my main birding is local patch birding, trying to find new stuff for a patch as wellas recording what and how many are present.  Having birded Whitemoor Haye for over 10 years I am slowly building up records of birds present on days and I keep these in various forms.  One form is a kind of scatter graph that I keep and at the end of the year I count up how many times a bird has been recorded and then work out the percentage for the year.  Sad eh????  Anyway one day maybe I will show my findings, in the meantime it is back to good old patch work and I was in  for a bit of a bonus.
First stop was the usual quarry pool and birds noted were Woodpigeon, Carrion Crow, Swallow, Pied Wagtail, Grey Heron, Cormorant, Pheasant, Black Headed Gull, Tree Sparrow, Sand Martin, Buzzard (in total I counted 7 throughout the area), Mute Swan, Lesser Black-backed Gull, 14 Lapwing over, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Goldfinch and also a cracking bonus.  Whilst checking over the pool I heard a Buzzard calling and I had a look through the bins at what I thought were two but in fact one was a Red Kite.  Not a suprising bird nowadays as they seem to be reported almost weekly but this was my first for Whitemoor Haye and also my first for Staffordshire at long last.  It hung around for 10 minutes before heading towards the field by Sittles farm so I decided to jump in my car hoping to photograph the bird but when I got to the field there was no sign for a short while before I suddenly saw it flying westwards before disappearing over the quarry.  Unfortunately no photograph but what a bird.  I headed back to the quarry to add House Martin before heading around the lanes and I added Stock Dove, 1 hawking Hobby, Linnet, 4 Mallard, Canada Geese, Common Whitethroat and Great Tit.  Not a bad session and the reason why local patch work is great.