An Active Week

Plenty of action this week with Waxwings to find and good numbers of birds in the garden. In fact the garden birds have peaked at eight Long Tailed Tits, twenty one Goldfinches, twenty House Sparrows, thirteen Greenfinches, two male Bullfinches and two Jays, besides the numerous Blue tits and Great tits, one Coal Tit, three Collared Doves, three Blackbirds. eight Starlings, two Robins, three Chaffinches, one Wren and one Great Spotted Woodpecker.

The Golf course has also proved good with a Stonechat catching insects one morning and a Green Woodpecker calling on another morning. At dusk one day there were five hundred Corvids going to roost. Another bonus was finding a roost of over fifty Reed Buntings one night on Hopwood set against the best sunset I have seen in ten years!

Local Waxwings at last at a school in Oldham, there were twelve in a fog. Luckily I managed some film before it became dense with a maximum day temperature of one degree centigrade. It was a tragedy to find that one Waxwing had flown into one of the school windows the day before and died – imagine flying all that way from Russia and then dying in what was probably the first window it was to see!!