Since yesterday I haven't noticed any activity in the front nest box but discovered it was another bluetit in the one on the garage. This one has been extremely busy this morning.
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...
Having heard there was a single cattle egret in a field in Fen Drayton a few weeks ago I drove over to have a look. Sure enough amongst the gulls in a field of cattle was the cattle egret. As I watched a farmworker appeared and the egret took flight but happily landed in a better position for me to take photographs!
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...
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