Trip reports

Titchwell Marsh

Water rail RSPB

Sunday, 22 January 2012

We'd a great day's birding at Titchwell Marsh RSPB for our second coach trip of the season. The weather was fine, mostly sunny and very windy. We made a good start with redpolls, including a single Arctic, feeding amongst the gold finches and tits in the alders near the car park. Heading onto the reserve, we had glimpses of a water rail coming and going under the feeders. Those who headed straight for the Fen Hide were the only ones of us to see a bittern. The day's best views of marsh harriers were also from there. Water levels were high on the freshwater marsh, but still enough standing room for good numbers of golden plover, several ruff and dunlin, the odd knot and turnstone, and a single common snipe. Aside from a mix of gulls and geese, ducks we saw included a female mandarin, several goldeneye, and around 20 pintails (mainly asleep). On the brackish marsh we added grey plover and a spotted redshank. Down at the beach there was a real sandstorm. Small dogs were disappearing in the sand flurries. Though there weren't huge numbers of birds, we did see gannet, kittiwake, eider and common scoter, and there were sanderlings and oyster catchers on the shoreline. We topped off our visit with fieldfares, redwings, chiffchaff, goldcrest and treecreeper in the woodland area back near the visitor centre.Our species total for the day was a pretty impressive 95.