No Ruff or Avocet but ROCK PIPIT compensates

FRIDAY 18 MARCH

Following a few days of SE winds and rather cold conditions, today followed in the a similar vein but with rain. In fact the rain eventually fizzled out late morning and was replaced by clear, bright conditions as the day came to a close.

I spent the day locally, connecting with yesterday's PIED AVOCET in North Bucks as well as a newly arrived GREY PLOVER and found one migrant SCANDINAVIAN ROCK PIPIT and then later saw another. Spring really is well and truly under way now..........

Sadly, a male Grey Partridge was dead beside the A603 at Long Acres, about 400 yards before the junction with the Sandy road.

DEREK WHITE'S EGG'S A1 PIT, BIGGLESWADE (BEDS)

No sign of the earlier Dunlin but the pair of Ringed Plovers, a Common Redshank and several Gadwall.

UPPER CALDECOTE (BEDS)

The WAXWING flock in the G & M Growers car park had risen to 94 birds at 1305 hours but shortly later, they all flew off and had not returned by the time I departed the area two hours later.

BROOM GP (BEDS)

As expected, the newly landscaped gravel working at the SE end of Gypsy Lane has started attracting good birds. SCB had just earlier during his lunch-break discovered a SCANDINAVIAN ROCK PIPIT here and less than 15 minutes later, I was watching it too. It was consorting with a single Meadow Pipit and was loosely associated with a migrant flock of some 18 Pied Wagtails and a pair of Linnet. I enjoyed some excellent views of it as it fed along the shoreline, the bird being more advanced than my earlier Wilstone bird, with a much paler grey head and a surprisingly bold white flaring supercilium. It was smudgily streaked as expected on the 'sullied' underparts and quite dingy overall, mainly brown in the upperwings and mantle and again, dark-legged. I heard it call several times it was in flight - a rather explosive but abrupt, high-pitched ''visssttt''. At one stage, it flew with all of the wagtails to the mounds in the pit adjacent and was still here when Jim Gurney joined me. I then later relocated it back on the main pit, where MJP, Lol Carman and Bob Chalkley then caught up with it, and watched it for a further 20 minutes or more at close range - an excellent addition to the Bedfordshire Year List.

Apart from these migrants, the pit held just a pair of Common Shelduck and a pair of Tufted Ducks.

I then spent over an hour and a half searching for Bearded Tits but to no avail - 95 Fieldfares, 15 Reed Buntings and a Common Chiffchaff being the only birds of note.

Lee G R Evans