It has been a strange couple of months – with little birding done due to travel restrictions because of local lockdowns. However, local patch birding has saved the day. The first couple of weeks have seen some favourable Easterly/ Northerly winds which brought in a very nice winter plumaged Great Northern Diver and a male Long Tailed Duck into Scarborough harbour. Unfortunately the Long Tailed Duck did not stop long and a dash to Scarborough proved unsuccessful. On our local patch the Great White Egret has been showing intermittently – it has now returned for its second year. Little Egrets are appearing on a regular basis too, for a small area in North Yorkshire seeing two species of Egret in a day is pretty amazing. What is more staggering is that in certain areas of the UK for example North Somerset it is perfectly feasible to expect to see three species of Egret in one day; Little, Great White and Cattle!!!! Last week brought another local surprise, in the form of a wintering male Blackcap !!! A new garden record for me – hopefully it will stay around for the winter. This time of year, when birding locally, it is always nice to connect with winter thrushes such as Redwing and Fieldfares. Unfortunately they have been thin on the ground – however, due to an easterly airflow midweek we were treated to massive numbers of Fieldfare and it was great to see them gorging themselves on the Hawthorn berries. The weather has now changed, so we are back to a South Westerly airflow so the next few days is going to be mild, damp with this weekend 12th /13th December being written off due to heavy rain. The joys of birding in the UK.
