Welcome to The Wondering Birder.

Hi readers before the usual birding post really begins let me truly introduce myself, I am now The Wondering Birder, I initially started up a blog poll with three name ideas, but with feedback received and me totally changing my mind randomly this name came to my head and it just felt right for some reason. So from now on I am The Wondering Birder and I hope you all continue to follow my birding highlights under this new name and thank you to those who voted and gave feedback about the blog, its a great feeling to know there are people out there who are enjoying reading my blog so I thank those who fed back to me after the name change proposal. Posting will not change in anyway I will be posting regularly every week or two weeks. By the way I hope you enjoy the blogs new orange color, I thought with the name change a design change had to come to.

So on with the main post then, in this post I will be covering last Sunday, this being 16/11/14, overall it was a nice days birding, before starting any birding we had to go up to Bilston to get a few things done but afterwards we decided to head over to Edgebaston Reservoir. The reason behind this perhaps random visit was that a Red Brested Merganser had been seen last Sunday on the reservoir. We weren't thinking that we were going to see the bird but what made us more inquisitive is that it hadn't actually been reported for an entire week, so either no one had been around or it had moved on. It turned out to be the second option in this case, the bird was no where to be seen at all, we had a good look around but no sign of it. Plenty of Great Crested Grebes were around as well as the usual suapects, other than that it was a ton of Feral Pigeon and a good amount of Black Headed and Lesser Black backed Gulls. 

So with a quiet visit to Edgebaston out of the way we moved over to Bartley Reservoir for the first of two visits on the Sunday. We arrived to a pretty quiet reservoir at first but with a bit of scanning 3 stunning Goldeneye came into view the first for this season for me, in addition a few Grey Herons were also around in good numbers as well as the usual suspects. So we went about our afternoon business and returned for another scan of the area. On arrival the Roost had dramatically grown, the numbers were very high overall, so we began scanning with little luck, eventually a nice looking adult Yellow Legged Gull came into view, we had a good look at this bird enjoying the bright white head that it had on show something I always enjoy seeing on these gulls. I had a quick chat with another birder, he said he had also had a Yellow Legged Gull but in first winter plumage, we caught up with this bird once I got back to our position, also he was waiting for the arrival of a Caspian Gull which has been around for a while now, unfortunately we couldn't stay around to get a good look, it was getting dark and we had to move off.

A big Gull Roost at Bartley.

That's all the birding done for this post, it was a quiet but good days birding overall, so that's it the first post under my new name, and the first of many I will say that, The Wondering Birder is here to stay I will say that and I hope everyone likes the name, and I will say again thanks to everyone that voted on the poll I put up, it was a dead heat by the end and I became less sure of my name choices so decided to go with something totally different, which I hope everyone likes. There will be another post soon,depending on the birding experiences had who knows what may arrive by next Sunday or perhaps before of course. 

Thanks for reading and have a good week all- WB