Trip reports

Bird Walk at Stour Wood, Copperas Bay and Abberton on Sunday 15th November.

Saturday, 5 December 2009

After two days of awful weather we were extremely fortunate that the ten participants on this walk were accompanied by bright sunshine, reasonable temperatures and only a slight breeze. There was no evidence of any damage caused by the high winds of the previous day but in some parts of the wood the remnants of the havoc created by the hurricane back in the 80's was still noticeable. It is remarkable how well nature has recovered from that apparent disaster.

It was very wet underfoot and Stour Wood was quiet with very few birds seen or heard. The autumn colours of the trees set against a glorious blue sky made for a pleasant walk down to the estuary at Copperas Bay. Here we saw lots of Great Crested Grebes, a pair of Brent Geese, a distant pair of Goldeneye and roosting on the far side large numbers of Oystercatchers and several Cormorants. Moving along the shoreline with high tide having turned and the first mud beginning to appear on the foreshore we saw a few Redshanks and then found a flock of seven Red-breasted Mergansers, the three males of which were often displaying.

In a small clump of alders we found a group of about half a dozen Siskins feeding and we obtained good scope views of these as they hung upside down extracting seeds from the cones. Further along we found more Brents and Redshank and a large flock of Lapwings wheeled around. Two or three Little Egrets were seen and good numbers of Wigeon with a few Teal.

Returning to the car park through a different part of the wood we found three Fly Agarics growing at the base of a birch tree and a few pictures were taken of these colourful but deadly fungi.

After eating our sandwiches eight of us drove to Abberton Reservoir where we saw five Bewick's Swans from the Roy King Hide and two Spoonbills and a female Stonechat from the Layer Breton Causeway, as well as many other more regular species. A nice end to a surprisingly glorious November day.