Saturday, September 26, 2009








Vis Mig at Prescot reservoirs,
There was a lot of birds moving through today with Meadow pipits and skylarks being the most numerous. With the help of Chris Derrie's excellent hearing we notched up 180 meadow pipits, 38 skylarks ,19 chaffinch, 100 + swallows, 150 house martins, 10 mistle thrushes, 30 pied wagtails and a couple of grey wagtails .This was just a couple of hours watching.
The 4 Little egrets that moved through east to west mid morning were an excellent record for the reservoirs doubling St Helens total number of little egrets in one go.
Also 6 song thrushes were on site with a single wheatear, 5 snipe, 3 mute swans, 4 blackcaps munching elderberries, 4 buzzards, kestrel and peregrine on a pylon.
A green sandpiper was on the wastewater balancing tank. This bird has been a regular visitor this autumn.
The red-breasted goose was with 78 barnacles that no doubt will end up at martin mere sometime during the winter.
Yesterdays adult ring-billed gull appeared mid morning to join 2 adult yellow legged gull, 105 lesser black backs, 20 herring gull, 60 common gull and 80 black headed gulls.
A text from Steve W with news of a long billed dowitcher at imf could not tempt me away today. Andy S and Pete K totally gripped me off with replies to my text to say that the Sandhill crane was showing well !!!




2 comments:

Colin said...

Some great pictures Steve. I'd love to have seen the egrets and the Ring-billed Gull, but we were halfway to IMF (thanks to SW) when you sent me the text.
Don't worry about the Crane. It'll be at Leighton Moss by the weekend! We can only dream!

Steve Tomlinson said...

Lets hope it keeps coming south .It would be a good Merseyside tick!!!