23rd October

Regent’s Park

Today was one of those days when I wish I was still back in Regent’s Park. It also shows that luck can be a major factor when birding, but it shows that you should never completely switch off.

Red-breasted Merganser: an adult female was on the lake this afternoon. This was only the 3rd park record, the others being February records in 1968 and 1976.

Short-eared Owl: while Dave was waiting for me to get to the lake to see the merganser he noticed that the BH Gulls had taken to the air and were hassling a large bird. He was over the moon to see a slow flapping Short-eared heading his way. Not liking the attention from the gulls it did a couple of fast wing-beats, picked up speed and headed off SW at 2.30pm.

Lapwing: there were two reports today; one at 9.16am and then seven at 1.30pm.

Woodlark: one flew SW at 9.32am.

Redwing: 285 flew through.

Blackbird: fifty plus headed SW.

Bushy Park

Not that productive even with a slightly higher cloud base.

Skylark: two singles.

Meadow Pipit: 40+ in the bracken area in the SE of the park.

Fieldfare: thirty flew through in various directions.

Redwing: one-hundred and fifty plus headed mainly SW, some of them landing briefly before continuing on their way.

Mistle Thrush: twenty-eight around the park.

Song Thrush: forty birds mostly in the area of scrub by Dukes Head Passage.

Lesser Redpoll: two singles.

Siskin: ten birds feeding and preening by Dukes Head Passage before flying towards the Canal Plantation.

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Red-breasted Merganser female

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just to prove that it is fully-winged, not that there are any in the waterfowl collection.

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Comments

Marc Heath said…
Nice one Tony.
Cheers Marc. Almost as rare here as your Olive-backed Pipit. Now that is a bird that I have yet to see. Maybe I will get lucky when air am in Corneal next week.
Marvelous!!! Would of loved to of seen the short eared owl.
So would have I, missed it by 10 minutes.
birdman_euston said…
26 Oct:
Seen from Primrose Hill lookout 08.00-09.30: 100+ Redwing N, 50+ Fieldfare N, 200+ Woodpigeon, 20+ Chaffinch, 1 Pied Wagtail. Also 1 Redpoll, 1 Common Gull (on lake fencepost off Holme Green, area 9), 2 Wigeon (female/subadult male initially with collection birds in Longbridge sanctuary but flew off on approach and landed off SE shore of Heron Island, area 8; Dave also had one sometime last week), 1 Gadwall, 8 Shoveler.