Hawfinches

Despite resisting for years I've finally caved and twitched some off-patch Hawfinches. Having missed the Hawfinches in Colyton on November 5th I was hopeful we'd get some more but so far my searches around Colyton have produced little of interest. Best of it has been a thrush flock visiting the yews at St Andrew's for a week now, with many Redwings (hundreds in Colyton at the moment) and a few Fieldfares. I'm still hoping to find some Hawfinches of my own but with Shute being only a few minutes up the road it was worth a trip up there to see the birds which have now been present for almost a week.

They were generally fairly distant but it was nice to see my first ones with 4+ there. Hopefully I'll get some better pics of these if they hang around for a while longer; the bird pictured below was the most showy in the short time I could spend there but it was a rather scruffy individual...

Only other bird worthy of note was a Cattle Egret flying over Colyton at 15:00 whilst I was returning from the Hawfinch twitch!