Last Thursday was forecast to be sunny and with the seemingly endless rain due to return on Friday, it did by the way, I decided to make the most of the weather and headed up to the Wyre Forest to see what migrants were in. I was expecting a few Pied Flycatchers and Redstarts but it’s a couple of weeks too early for the Wood Warblers. I parked in the small Dry Mill Lane carpark and made my way down the road into the forest. I paused by an ornate carved wooden bench, a good spot in the past for Tree Pipits, and scanned the forest. I picked up one distant singing Tree Pipit and two singing Willow Warblers. A small group of birders put me onto a male Pied Flycatcher on the other side of the road and I managed a fleeting view as it flew off. I walked on down to the second old railway bridge and walked up into the Pied Flycatcher nest box area where I again had a fleeting view of one male bird.
I next made my way further into the forest to a spot that has been good for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers in the past and was pretty sure I heard one someway off drumming but I could not get the bins on it. Behind me in an old orchard a Redstart called and I spent 15 minutes trying to see it without success. This is typical of my experience of Redstarts in the Wyre Forest which seem, to me at least, to be much more skittish than those in the New Forest and the woodlands of Wales.
I walked back to the main path and down the valley where the Wood Warblers have been for the past few years, but as expected, there was no sign yet. I dropped down to the bottom of the valley and followed the small stream towards the outdoor adventure building and the old mill. I stopped on one of my favourite spots, a wooden bridge over the stream and had a coffee and a large chunk of my wife’s delicious home-made ginger cake. The sun was out, birds were singing and it was a beautiful spring day. I reconciled myself to just fleeting views or heard onlys for the birds I was hoping to see rationalising that these were the kind of days I dreamed of when I was stuck in an office, when a female Dipper flew under the bridge and landed on a mid-stream stone a few meters away from me. She was shortly joined by a male and both moved agilely along the stones and through the fast moving steam picking up some kind of what looked like insect larva.
Dippers are supremely well adapted to their life in fast moving streams. They have evolved solid bones to reduce their buoyancy, and their wings are relatively short but strongly muscled, enabling them to be used as flippers underwater. They have a high haemoglobin concentration in their blood which gives them a capacity to store oxygen for longer than most other birds, allowing them to remain underwater for up to 60 seconds.
They seemed completely oblivious to my presence and carried on catching grubs for 30 minutes or so until their beaks were rammed full. At this point I moved slowly off leaving them to carry on with their activity. For the past few years they have normally nested at another location on the stream which I will not divulge for obvious reasons. I know they nest early and, as they were collecting rather than eating the insects, I assume they had young in the nest but I was surprised, if indeed this was true, how long they left them for.
I walked past the old mill and back into the nest box area where I spotted another male Pied Flycatcher. This time it stayed on a branch for a few minutes and then flew to and inspected a nearby nest box at which point I thought I should move on and leave him to it. I believe the males tend to arrive a week or two before the females and I guess he was checking out the real-estate in readiness for their return.
On the way home I popped into Clifford Pits, an area that has held large numbers of Yellow Wagtails in the past few years. This time there was just a single rather dapper looking male bird. The reason was fairly obvious, the adjacent cereal field that they nest in had been rotated to a potato crop and the whole field was covered in very un-green plastic to protect the shoots from frost. A couple of Little Ringed Plovers, a House Martin and a Common Sandpiper were all new birds for the year for me.
Perhaps most surprisingly of all a flock of Goosanders were sound asleep on the far shore. I think there were 7 birds and only one male. I would have thought that they would be paired up and have made their way north of breed by now so both the fact that so many were still there and their gender mix seemed quite unusually to me.
Also of note during the day were the large numbers of Cowslips I saw, together with Bluebells my favourite spring flowers. Way back when I was a boy growing up in the sticks in Wiltshire they were quite rare so they seem to have made a very welcome comeback.
I made my way home quite elated by my 7 hours in the beautiful English spring countryside.
Lovely post thank you for sharing. Ive lived near the forest for most of my adult life and love to hear about the wildlife it supports. Jason
ReplyDeleteLovely photos of hard to find birds. Thank you for sharing.
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