It's Been A Long, Long Time. Hasn't It?

32 days in fact. I've been out and about every day but not far and not with my camera usually, for reasons I won't bore you with.

However it's time for another update before I forget what the heck has been going on.

The most recent event of note was of course Storm Arwen that wreaked so much havoc over the country - not least on my old mate Dave, who suffered days without power in Coniston. We had an outage of a few hours but that was nothing in comparison.

I walked through Wassand Wood this morning for the first time since the storm 8 days ago and saw trees down Here, There and Everywhere. Two of them are over the path to the hide:

A broken oak tree over the path

The remainder of the oak tree

One of the large pine trees blew down and over the path

There is no immediate rush to move these of course as there is little activity worth noting on the Mere or in the wood these days, and anyone who really wants to get to the hide can still do so - I did 😂😂

The beach has been almost devoid of interesting wildlife too over the past month, with just a few Sanderling along the tide line to maintain some level of worth-looking-at-ness. The gulls are perused with the hope that something different may show up, but it hasn't yet. I haven't even seen a Turnstone yet through the rest of November and December to date.

Single Sanderling on the beach

There was a sighting of a Dunnock on the beach, checking out a washed up lobster pot though. I hoped it was a Rock Pipit when I first saw it, but of course it wasn't 🙄

Dunnock inspecting a lobster pot

On the cliffs I came across a Song Thrush that looked a bit different. Eventually I worked out that it had the upper mandible of its bill missing. It seemed to be doing OK without it, it didn't look undernourished or ill and bounced along like a normal thrush would.

Song Thrush with upper part of its bill missing

The flock of birds in and around the set aside field is always a sight worth seeing and checking for something different. I saw a couple of Lesser Redpoll feeding on Great Willowherb seed heads earlier in the week but haven't seen them since. Here's a list of species seen in the area and maximum counts:

2 Lesser Redpoll

6 Yellowhammer

3 Brambling

18 Chaffinch

c.30 Goldfinch

4 Bullfinch

c.80 Linnet

8 Tree Sparrow

c.30 Reed Bunting

Brambling

Brambling

Yellowhammer

Reed Bunting

Chaffinch