A beautiful calm misty morning greeted us as we made our way to St Ives for our early morning wildlife watching boat trip on the River Great Ouse. We met up with the remainder of the 12 passengers and boarded the electric powered boat with the aim of spotting as many different birds by sight or sound as we could. I was given the job of official sightings recorder! As we silently pulled away from the pontoon I soon had 20 birds on my list, with everyone calling out what they could see. The weather was perfect with the mist rising from the river. Passing by the reed beds we clearly picked out both the reed and sedge warbler, the latter easily identified with its eye stripe. Someone spotted oyster catchers and a sparrow hawk flying over head and a kingfisher flew past though the traditional blue colours were not visible. Some people did spot one later on. The tally soon approached 40. Three types of gees...
Although the weather didn't look that great for butterfly spotting, we hoped that the sun would break through later and in any case the temperature was quite warm already as we left to visit a new nature reserve and butterfly trail. We found the reserve in the end although it would have helped if either my sat nav or road atlas actually recognised the new 11A junction on the M1! College Lake is a former quarry and we were quite surprised when we looked out the visitor centre window and found we were looking right down on top of the whole area! Various ducks and geese were evident together with terns, and a few waders. We took the circular walk and unexpectedly came across a patch of grass and trefoil where we found large numbers of small blue butterflies, a few common blues and brown argus too ... and the sun wasn't even out! The sky seemed to brighten a bit from time but there weren't many other butterflies about except for a brims...
The morning dawned rather dull and cloudy with light rain forecast so I decided to keep an eye out over an hour in the morning whilst carrying on with household chores. I filled up my feeders yesterday in the hope that might entice a few more species. First to arrive were a group of three long tailed tits which have started to visit the garden regularly. Then a robin, bluetit and dunnock followed shortly after. I noted three wood pigeons sitting up in the trees, with one venturing down to the feeders later. Not much else around for the rest of the hour except for a jackdaw that rather likes the fat balls. So a bit disappointing but the dreary weather probably didn't help much. Anyway a few species to enter on the birdwatch form so worth doing.
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