January 20th

After five days in the Camargue and some appalling weather and man flu another rather inaccurate weather forecast was fortunately ignored and I ventured round the pits for the whole day. A total of 7 Goosanders during the day was most unusual but the first year tick was a fortuitous encounter with a party of five Bearded Tits by the shore hide where I was searching for a white-winged gull to no avail. The two males and three females were seen well low in the foreshore reedbed which was somewhat surprising as none had been seen around the pits for several weeks. The next surprise was the sighting of an adult Little Gull feeding over the fields by Chowder Ness with Black-headed Gulls. This bird had apparently been seen the previous week in the same place. Buoyed by this success a search for Jack Snipe on their favoured wet meadow seemed a good idea and three Jack Snipe later it seemed an even better decision! With the ball rolling I walked down to have a listen for the Bridge pit Cetti’s Warbler and was shocked to hear it immediately on the other side of the road where it rattled and called several times in 20 minutes. A long afternoon vigil at Far Ings produced an unexpected drake Scaup plus excellent views of the drake Smew displaying to his female Goldeneye along with a fine drake Goldeneye, a roost count of 58 Magpies and at 16:37 a Bittern eventually flew all of 10m before dropping in again in the gathering gloom. So with 11 days still to go the list reached 95 species equal to that achieved in January 2003, just one behind the 96 seen in January 1996 but still trailing the 2002 record January total of 99 species.