18 January 2012

It was a rather misty and gloomy morning around Westport.

The good news was it was rather warm, from below freezing over the last few days up to 7c this morning, counting the ducks was proving rather difficult with me only being happy about my count by the end of the visit when a rain shower came through and cleared the mist for a short while.

In total 13 Mute Swans were present this morning with the resident family of 4 on the main lake and the rest on the boating lake, I tried to tempt them over with bread but the only ring I could read was CL87 which has been on for a while now with its unrung partner. I managed a count of 44 Tufted Duck on the main lake along with 16 Pochard, 3 Goldeneye and a single Great Crested Grebe.

As usual there were large numbers of Black-headed Gulls around 300+ among them there were 6 Lesser Black-backed Gulls, a single Common Gull and Herring Gull which was my first of the year for Westport, hopefully with large numbers of white winged gulls moving through from the north at the moment we will manage to get one at Westport.

The other areas were pretty quiet really, 3 Mistle Thrushes were around, 2 Chaffinches a single male Bullfinch and a Siskin flew over, in the nature reserve a Treeceeper was in the Tit flock, again another Westport year tick out of the way.