2015 a New Birding Year Begins!

4/01/15- Let the birding begin I always say, the first proper birding I managed to do this year was on the 4th day of this new year and it was a very good days birding with a few good year ticks had. In the last couple of years I have been interested in year listing but in a different way to some birders, a lot of people use their year lists to compete with other birders which hasn't always appealed to me, I prefer to create year lists to have something to look back on to know exactly when I have seen birds as a memory in the future. I have year listed for three years now and haven't ever really got good numbers from my lists but that's mainly because at this stage in my birding life I am not a serious twitcher, I do it when I can which is only once a week and even that depends on whats around, so at the moment I use year lists as a way to document everything I see.

So lets take a guess where the birding this year began, yes RSPB Sandwell Valley my favourite place to visit. A visit to the hide is always due at this time of year because the more commoner species need to be seen and the hide is often the best place to see them. The more common species were in the bag throughout the sit in the hide, the Pintail showed very well and came up close to the hide for a few photographs which is something it doesn't do to often it's usually a much shier bird. A single Goldeneye made an appearance also which was a nice year tick to come out of the valley as in recent years it's a species that hasn't been seen quite as much. Grey Wagtail was another species in the bag and of course we saw the usual amount of Snipe that were around all over the place. The valley is always my place to start the years birding seen as its the location I visit the most throughout the year where else could I start.

Pintail at Sandwell Valley.

Pintail at Sandwell Valley.

Pintail at Sandwell Valley

Where next we began to ask ourselves, well we decided on going to see the Great Norhtern Diver at Coayhanger Marsh, it would be the second time I had been for the bird the first time being so my friend and we got stunningly close views of it, but I always like to get the Great Northern Diver for the year it's a species we see most years now so it couldn't be left out. We headed over and guess which idiot was wearing trainers, yes that's me, my feet were freezing. The cold and wet conditions at Clayhanger didn't help we could walk along the main path because it was just abysmal so we walked through an equally bad field but it was perhaps slightly better than sinking in mud with no wellies on. We got to Ryders Mere to see a tone of Wildfowl Wigeon, Goosander, Pochard and a few others, but at this stage no sign of the Diver, but we carried on for just a little longer, and with a bit of luck it appeared not to far away in he middle of the mere showing very well, a Great Northern Diver is always a good bird to see early on in the year and there always seems to be one near Chasewater somewhere. In addition to the Diver we also had a couple of Common Gull fly by and noticed a massive load of Canada geese and gulls in a field near the mere something worth checking on in the future. The pictures bellow were taken on my first visit to see the diver, 

Great Northern Diver displaying my new watermark. 

After success with the diver we headed over to Chasewater to hopefully bag a few good gulls in early on in the year. We got over there and pretty much lost hope instantly the fog across he reservoir was terrible although I managed to get a Yellow Legged Gull in view just before the fog took away visibility. With no visibility we decided to walk a bit further up towards the jetty. We joined a group of birders who were looking at the large group of gulls on the jetty, we had some success we managed to get a first winter Caspian Gull briefly before it disapeared behind the jetty out of view, after this we waited around in the freezing cold for a little while longer and technically saw a Glaucous Gull however the view we managed to get were totally unticakable I would have even known the bird was there without direction it was so foggy so it's not going on the year list just yet but we did technically see a Glaucous just not very well. 

That's an end to the first birding day of the year, and a successful one I would say, some good birds had the Diver was the highlight for me I always enjoy seeing them in the winter and it's great to see one over Clayhanger Marsh, in fact I believe it's the first they have ever had over there so it's an important bird therefore it's all the more better that it's staying around for a long time, there should be another post soon I won't necessarily have a set time I will upload posts I will just upload when I can I will always tweet out on Twitter when a new post is up so keep a check on there if you are looking for the latest posts popping up. 

Thanks for reading and enjoy the week- WB