Trip reports

Bird Walk at Fisher's Green, Lea Valley.

Sunday, 14 January 2007

For many years this January meeting has been highly successful. We have always been fortunate with the weather, and in this very unseasonable month it appeared that our luck would hold us in good stead. However because the weather has been so mild for most of the winter so far, many of the birds which normally spend these months in our locality do not seem to have reached us yet. They have probably stopped off en route from their summer breeding grounds at places where conditions are still favouable and food supplies plentiful. For this reason we did not encounter some of the rarer species that we normally find, such as Bittern, which we were informed by the warden (ranger) has only been seen three times this winter.

Birds may have been in short supply but human numbers were very high with thirty setting off on the walk, and almost fifty reaching the car park 2 1/2 hours later as several others tagged on as we walked round. As well as no Bittern, we failed to see Water Rails from the hide, which I would put down to water levels in the reedbed being higher than usual, probably due to excessive rainfall recently. More surprisingly we did not see any Kingfishers, which surely ought to have been active on a fine sunny day with lighter winds than of late. Several species of ducks were seen, including Goldeneye, Shelduck, Shoveler, Gadwall, Teal and Pochard, and on fields adjacent to the reserve three Egyptian Geese and four Barnacle Geese fed alongside the more numerous Canada Geese. Great Crested and Little Grebes showed well in reasonable numbers, but passerine numbers were very low consisting mainly of Great and Blue Tits, the latter hanging upside down on alder cones where we would have hoped to have found Siskins and Redpolls. A rather distant Buzzard was watched over woods for several minutes as it gradually soared higher. Apart from numerous Lapwings the only wader seen by the group was a less than confiding Snipe.

After lunch my wife and I walked considerably further to the south (extremely exhausting!) but were rewarded with Pintail and Wigeon on Hall Marsh scrape, and eventually on Bowyer's Lake brilliant views of a beautiful male Smew accompanied by two 'redhead' females. Unfortunately as Carol Vorderman occasionally says on Countdown after solving a particularly difficult mathematical problem rather late "It was out of time!"