It's been a while...

It's been a while since I last posted.

It's been a very busy few months fitting in exams, work and birding, so I haven't really had time to post anything. Next year I've got a few paid ornithological surveying jobs, as well as working on a species monitoring project I managed to get funding for. Then, come September, I hope to be starting a 1yr diploma in Nature Recovery at Black Mountains College, Wales.

This will be my final blog post and I thought a round-up of perhaps the place I've written about the most would be fitting...

As regular readers will know, I often post about my local patch, Much Marcle Ridge in Herefordshire, where I watch from to do visible migration (vismig). I was pretty dedicated to it this autumn, and barely went anywhere else!

After August's superb deluge of migrants, September was a very odd month on the ridge, with unusually low counts of classic early Autumn migrants, particularly Meadow Pipit. This was probably due to the weather - weeks of clear skies, perfect for birds to move in, but meant they were flying very high up and out of sight - rather than a genuine lack of migrants. However, there were still good days to be had, with a few decent mornings for grounded migrants, featuring good counts of Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler, with smaller numbers of Spotted Flycatcher, Redstart and Stonechat.

The two highlights from the month was a grounded Grasshopper Warbler on the 7th, and a very busy House Martin and Swallow morning on the 25th, with 2436 and 475 through respectively. 

October and November was when the vismig really got going, as migrants from Scandinavia and further east poured into the country. Over the two months, we gathered some respectable totals of these species: 3169 Starling, 2985 Redwing, 1779 Chaffinch, 859 Fieldfare and 127 Song Thrush. Some of the best scarcer species from this period included vismig records of 6 Brambling, 3 Crossbill, 2 Snipe and 2 Merlin. Grounded migrants were thin on the ground, but I was pleased to find a Ring Ouzel on the 19th. 

As always, late October through to early November provided large numbers of migrating Woodpigeon - between the 21st of October and the 9th of November, a total of 77,215 birds were logged. 

Although not the most typical Autumn with rather odd arrival dates for a few species, lack of certain migrants and not many 'big' days, it was fantastic to be watching the ridge regularly (nearly 150 hours this season), adding a piece to the vismig jigsaw.

A real feature of the last few month's local birding has been the cracker of a bird that is the Hawfinch! 

There was a large influx of continental/Scandinavian birds earlier into the county in October, the largest since the mega arrival in 2017/18. Hawfinches are an 'eruption' species, and occasionally it 'erupts' from their breeding grounds and arrive in large numbers in other countries; this is probably driven by breeding success and local food crop failure. 

Since early November, I have seen a total of 14 birds locally - a remarkable amount for my little corner of Herefordshire! 

The best sighting was in my local churchyard in late November during that cold snap; after seeing snow on the ground in the morning, I thought it might be worth checking the churchyard in case Hawfinches had been forced down to lower ground by the cold. Turns out they had been, as I discovered a group of 4! 

This Marsh Tit on my patch brings me to the end of my final blog post.

I just wanted to say a very big thank you to everyone who has read these blogs since I started writing them in 2021. Thank you in particular to everyone who has commented - reading them after every post really made the writing worth while. 

It's been great fun writing these and I hope it's been enjoyable reading them! 

One last thing...

For those of you who want to continue seeing what I'm up to, I've now moved to Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/birder1.bsky.social