What I did at the weekend.

When Mike asked us "where are you birding this weekend?" I'll admit my reply was not overly optimistic:

I shall hopefully be adding an absolute raft of passerine species to raise my new island list to where it should be by now….or more likely spending a lot of time staring at patches of brambles which keep making firecrest noises but not actually seeing any birds.

Now as you may recall from my last attempts to build an island list, I put together decent numbers of waders, waterfowl, raptors and seabirds but let myself down by failing to get the passerines in the numbers I would have hoped. At the moment my list for this island is remarkably short of passerines despite a couple of days about which was the source of my pessimism. In fact I was missing about 10 species I'd expect to see by spending an afternoon glancing at my father's birdfeeders occasionally. So I decided to go out and look for passerines..........and then I saw a report of a wrecked Great Northern Diver released on a local site and changed my mind. I'm fairly sure I saw the diver but the views were decidedly untickable (gah!). I did manage to see some lovely waterbirds though including old favourites of the blog - common snipe:

and an island tick: water rail

I must confess I was feeling a little demoralised after screwing up the Diver and seeing a relatively difficult to see (albeit fairly common) bird like this was a welcome boost. I did manage to add a couple of (very common) passerines to my list too including this lovely long-tailed tit.

The list is currently sitting fairly low in the mid-30's. I'm expecting it to grow fairly rapidly as there are still a whole lot of common familiar birds for me to find here. Once I get a few more shots up I'll put together a list sub-page so you can monitor (and laugh at) my (lack of) progress.