Wildlife with Hugh

A pleasant surprise during the most recent farmland bird survey at Medmerry was a Richard’s pipit that flew out of one of the fields. Richard’s pipits are classed as vagrants in Britain, they breed in Siberia and parts of central and eastern Asia, migrating to overwinter around the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia. They appear annually in Britain but not in large numbers. The ones that find their way to our shores have therefore come quite a bit out of their way.

I had planned a shorter guided outing to Nutbourne Channel, Chichester Harbour, although it ended up being not so short! This is an area where you can often get closer to wetland bird species than at most locations. There had been a lot of rain recently, fortunately this trip was on a wonderful winters day, bright and crisp.

This post contains some highlights from a fortnightly farmland bird survey, which was carried out at RSPB Medmerry last week. It was a remarkably warm day while the sun was out – t-shirt weather in November!

Last week I had the pleasure of being a birding guide on two solar boat tours around Chichester Harbour. Birdwatching from a boat is not something I have regularly done and I enjoyed the opportunity to get a different perspective of our wintering wetland birds.

Farlington Marshes is one of my favourite places, and a guided birdwatching trip there in late October highlighted why this is. It was a gloriously sunny and clear day with barely any breeze to speak of. And the birds were even better than the weather!

This post is about some highlights from the most recent farmland bird survey at RSPB Medmerry. Myself and another surveyor, Mike, do these surveys fortnightly throughout the year. This one took place on a gorgeous sunny day in October with barely a breath of wind, and represented somewhat of a changing of the guard in regards to the bird species we recorded.

One week later and another guided birdwatching trip to the same local wood. It was interesting to compare the two outings, broadly similar species were seen however the themes of the day were quite different. Right at the start a tawny owl called but remained silent thereafter. A group of 4 hawfinches flew around and landed up out of sight. And a chiffchaff was calling in a small orchard.