The last two weeks we've started to get our first southern movement of Waders, along with other early spring / summer breeders that have either failed to breed or have already fledged their first brood of chicks. It's a good time of year as you really could get anything turning up at the Reservoir. Lucky for me I get to scan the banks while on Boat patrols at work and the last two days have pulled up quite a few waders that I would have missed if walking on the bank. Today I found a single Oystercatcher, 6 Common Sandpiper and 2 Redshank. Also this week we've had a pair of Little Ring Plover, Greenshank, Green Sandpiper and a single Juvi Lapwing.
Hard to believe that we used to have Lapwing breeding onsite in decent numbers and now we're lucky if we get a single summer visit from one.

Please take the time to listen with a good pair of headphones (if you have a pair of course). Sound Quality doesn't get much better than this. It's a short recording of an evening chorus on my local moorland/woodland which was painted with the passing by of off-road bikers. Something that we're getting a lot more of lately. A group of 20 Bikers travelled from London just to rip up OUR local moorland... Very frustrating.

In other news, it was nice to see 3 Oystercatchers stopping off this evening for a rest during their spring Migration to their breeding grounds. They looked very tired but were also very un-settled about staying with quite a lot of cars buzzing by the damn wall. You need only pop your head over the wall for them to fly off and circle the area before settling again.

While you have your headphones on, this recording was taken during the evening chorus and before the Motorbikes turned up so I managed a fairly lengthy recording of this Robin. I did however capture a plane in the background which is near impossible this day and age to get anything but with planes going over every 5-10 minutes no matter where you are.

This next recording deserves a blog post of its own to be honest as I could talk about this for hours. It's a manipulation of a Skylark recording that shows just how complex their song actually is. By slowing down the recording, you can pick out individual beats like it was a peace of music. Yet, even having slowed this recording 7 times slower than its original speed, the rhythms are still extremely fast and hard to comprehend! It's a drummers dream to reach speeds this fast and something we will never achieve as human beings without the aid of computers. Yet again, out-trumped by the natural world and we clearly still have a lot to learn, even with something that we consider a very human trait, after-all, we invented music right? I think not ;)

Blog Content

Wader Week

Too much to talk about!