January 1st Birding

The weather today was similar to that of January 1st 2016 - pretty wet. The Cattle Egret was still on patch this morning; Brendan had it in fields North of A3052 shortly after 9am. I had a look around later both by the A3052 and by Colcombe Farm in Colyton but the rain was pretty persistent by this time and I couldn't relocate it. There were around 80 Fieldfare in the field and surrounding trees by the A3052 which is the most I've seen together on patch so far this Winter. There were some smaller thrushes in with them but I couldn't tell what they were due to distance (will no doubt be a mixture of Redwing and Song Thrush).

I popped to Colyton for lunch and had a brief walk around but the rain kept most of the little birds away and sheltered. A female Blackcap was probably the best of the lunchtime birds.

A brief walk along the River Coly yielded nice views of Dipper, with one bird singing and displaying. I didn't keep the camera out for long as it was raining fairly badly by this time; it would have been nice to capture the singing on video but that can wait for another occasion. I saw a single Dipper on a different stretch of the Coly about a fortnight ago so it's good to know that this wasn't just a fluke - hopefully they settle down and manage to breed without the nest getting washed out by flooding (both Kingfisher and Dipper nests have been destroyed by flooding & associated soil erosion in recent years).

Such characterful birds to watch.

ISO 4000 and a large crop hence the poor image quality (taken 31/12/16). Cracking bird though!

EDIT: Fiona Hackman has just read this post and informed me that she sees Dipper regularly at an upstream location near where I saw the single bird a fortnight ago. If she has them regularly there and there's 2 regularly a couple miles downstream then there could potentially be 2 pairs. Hopefully this is the case rather than the first pair simply ranging over a large territory on a regular basis. Further investigation needed...