Had a good few weeks but they have been very busy. Thankfully I have had some spare time this weekend as I am not sort of finished my ICT work and I am having my break. I just discovered these new things called weeeeek ends(?). I was out last Saturday with my friends and we headed up to Kielder Forest so I will start from there:
Saturday 28th of March
The day started of at an undisclosed watch point on Kielder. As soon as we got out the car I was rewarded with views straight away of a female Goshawk and my mate had a male in his scope. I was watching the Goshawk and asking my mate if he had it and he said yes and his instructions of what it was doing was different to my bird. Then it all soon became clear when I asked something like “Have you got two birds together now!?” and he answered yes and it was clear that it must have been his male Goshawk and my female coming together before they quickly disappeared and we never saw them again. As I was about to have some tea from the flask I heard a strange bird call behind me from the pines. I saw something at the top of the tree. I thought it was going to be a cone but I lifted my bins and COMMON CROSSBILL! A bogey bird no more! A cracking male Common Crossbill gave some pretty brief but fantastic views. Only saw it for about 1 minute or so before it flew off. We had loads of buzzards throughout the day as well as 2 Sparrowhawk. We had one last look at a spot where some lads had told us they saw Goshawk in the morning. On arrival we saw it was a good spot and had a look around and then fetched out scopes to have a look for Goshawks. On the way back with out scopes I spotted a Goldcrest and this was a year tick for me. We spent about 1 hour at the watch point and we had a whole load of buzzards and a few possible goshawks but with every one as soon as I got a different angle view I dismissed them all as just buzzards. THEN! Just before we where about to do a large brown raptor came up and I just knew looking at it that it was a goshawk quite structurally different from the buzzards having spent most of the day looking at them. It was way way off just like the buzzards I had been watching so was sure it was a goshawk and I stick by my ID. So three Goshawks was a good number for the day.
Sunday 29th March
Had a look out with one of my mates from Stew’s Crew. We went to look for the Great White Egret but had no luck however plenty of Avocets as well as Black-tailed Godwit which was a nice surprise and a year tick for me.
Saturday 3rd April
Had a look out to Hartlepool Headland and saw the Black-throated Thrush that was present. A cracking male bird and it showed really well on the ground but only very briefly and then it flew into a tree and I got ok views of it sitting in the tree. A Durham first and a county tick for me.
My year list has gone up quite a lot and I got 1 lifer with Common Crossbill. Some cracking birding days but haven’t had time to update my blog that much.
Going out tomorrow so I will update my sightings page on what I see.
(Black-throated Thrush - 3/04/2010 - Teesside - Andrew Kinghorn )
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