What's flying near you?

A juvenile robin turned up at the watering place this morning.

SOme odd looking birds as well. One splashing around looks a bit like a small sparrow with a mohecan haircut. I think it is a juvenile coal tit but not sure.

Most of the summer visitors have gone now. The willow warblers, chiffchaffs and most of the swallows. One day last week, there were about 200 swallows swooping over the local fields, probably migrating from further north. Now there are just 3 flying round and going in and out of the old coal shed. They have a late brood they are feeding. They should fledge soon but I doubt many of them will survive. They will hardly of started flying and feeding themselves and they will be off on a trip of few thousand miles.

The only things flying round here are sparrows and hundreds of miner bees, oh and a very cross great tit stuck inside the fruit cage.

Lots of swallows and martins still passing through the valley on their way south, quite late this year, I feel.

MrB saw a large Buzzard flying low over the garden usually we only see them high up in the sky.

This is a really unusual sight, at least thirty griffon vultures found a thermal just behind the house! We usually only see them up in the mountains.

   

They're were a bit high for photography

A dusting of snow and the drop in temperatures (a high of 2C here) has brought out lots of birds. Dunocks and wrens scavenging on the floor, fieldfare and blackbirds eating windfall apples, robins, tits, sparrows and a couple of jays at the bird table, tits and woodpeckers and crows after the nuts in the feeders. There were a couple of hundred rooks round a farm at the back of us yesterday.

Great spotted woodpecker pecking his way up an ash tree stump yesterday, Fascinating to watch- from the comfort of the kitchen.

MrB spotted a Heron flying out of our Silver birch tree, by the time I'd got to the window it had gone.

Lots of migrating cranes today, they do make an amazing noise. And two goldcrest were busy in the hedge next to me and never noticed. Little stunners!