A strange tern of events

This weekend saw a worrying development in my mental well being. I went birding locally on two consecutive days. Normally I have better things to do with my time than waste it trying in vain to struggle with finding a handful of birds or other wildlife. But, I have recently felt my lack of natural history is not good and I should make an effort to get out as it can't really be all that bad.

My first trip on Saturday, was to drive the other side of the A1 to visit the Broom complex of gravel pits. There are, so I was recently informed, two areas of interest. Those being the main lake just off the Stanford road which should be good for passage terns and gulls. The other is the new workings nearby along Gypsy Lane which seems to be more popular with passage waders. My first port of call was the main lake where the 30 or so common terns looked most impressive as the hawked over the water for fish. I scanned them quite intensively with both binocular and telescope in the vain hope of finding an arctic tern, but my luck was not to be. There were good numbers of tufted duck, great crested grebe and coot present. There were also breeding lapwing, redshank and oystercatcher.

Yes - you did just read that right, surprisingly enough I even got my telescope out of the cupboard to use. I thought I might need to mug up from some beginners guide instructions on how to use it at first. But I soon got the hang of it after initially wondering why everything at first seemed further away until realising I needed to look through the end with the smaller diameter lens.

The short drive along to Gypsy Lane was new territory for me. They new workings seemed to be fairly quiet with just a small handful of common tern, lapwing, redhank and oystercatcher again present. There were also a couple of shelduck, but nothing really in the way of wader passage. 

The next day, I decided to take a long walk around the fields and woods closer to home. I set off first toward some horse paddocks, then along some farm hedges past ploughed fields before turning back into the woods and emerging by the TV transmitter mast. I then wandered around there before heading along the road which meets up with bridleway that runs in a west-east direction just north of my house, before heading off it along the track and road home. There was very little to see on the walk but the wonderful song of skylarks were a treat. Its such a lovely sound and is certainly one of the most evocative of sounds, synonymous of the English countryside. I also managed to see an orange tip and a brimstone butterfly.