Chasing after Yellow Eyebrows

Hi readers, yes its time for the weekly installment of birding from me. This week was all about Warbler twitching and Warbler twitching in Worcestershire to be more specific. Our main location for the best part of the day was of course Uffmoor Wood where a Yellow Browed Warbler had been for the last few days or so. We decided it was the bird we were going to try an see today so we got off straight over to Uffmoor Wood. On arrival we basically followed the crowd, we asked a few birders on the way where the best place to look was and followed their instructions. We were advised to go straight to the bottom of the path and turn right, so that twas what we did. Well the best part of it, when we got to the bottom of the path it was terrible conditions, we couldn't walk through it and stupidly had no wellies on so we walked back on ourselves and decided to take the long but less muddy way round so we didn't drown in mud.

This decision sort of turned out to be a hell of a lot worse, 3 hours is all I will say, we had to have walked the entire perimeter of Uffmoor Wood every path was plastered in thick slippy mud and the conditions were terrible, and birders who passed us were telling us the bird was no where to be seen. However we pushed on and I can only guess we went the wrong way because as we walked on we saw less and less people but even worse more and more mud. I was beginning to get tired and to be honest a little frustrated, by the time we had got back to the car park it would have been about 1:30pm and we started at about 11am so we had trekked through mud for a long time.

When we arrived back at the car park we decided to kill some time and have a look down some other paths, after ten of fifteen minutes we began to hear a mass of calling coming from the trees, this sounded good so we pressed on to see what the birds were. It turned out there was a descent mixed flock of Siskin and Lesser Redpoll, we had a good look at these birds and pressed on towards the main path and then we planned to go back to the car. However when reaching the main path we met yet another birder who promptly told us he had seen the Warbler back down at the bottom of the path again a little earlier on, so again we pushed through the muddy path half dead and very thirsty but eager to see the bird if it was still around, part way down the path we were informed by another birder that the bird was actually showing which caused us to press on even through the deeply muddy part of the path we avoided earlier although we did both nearly fall into a stream but the less said about that the better.

We arrived to see three or four birders starring up at a tree, so we creep-ed into the wood area where they were looking and after a few seconds there it was a YELLOW BROWED WARBLER the bird came unbelievable close to me and I really enjoyed watching it after all the effort, I didn't dare to get my camera out seen as the Valcrow on my camera bag was to loud to get it out, the bird offered brilliant views and we were chuffed to see it. I am advising anyone who hasn't been to see the bird yet that you really, really, need a pair of Wellies without them life will become a lot more messy. Here's the main sightings from the visit,

Uffmoor Wood- Yellow Browed Warbler x1, Lesser Redpoll 5+, Siskin 5+, Nuthatch x1, Buzzard 5+, Long tailed Tit 5+, Goldcrest 5+.

Chuffed with seeing the Warbler we went away for food something high on the agenda after the eventful day we had, had. To end the of the day now where we decided to end on a visit to Bartley Green reservoir, the odd Yellow Legged Gull was around along with the usual suspects.

So not a bad days birding overall, a lot of hard work went into seeing the warbler but in the end it payed off when we saw the bird, I have no idea whats happening next week but there will be some birding and it will take place somewhere (Sandwell Valley cough, cough) so look out for next weeks post, if there are any before I will tweet about it so you know. Again I want to thank you all for reading my blog I've recently hit 3000 views and it means a lot to know that people do want to read my blog and all the birding stories I have to offer, I hope you all stick with me to see what birding experiences I have.

Thanks for reading and have a good week all- WMBB