This ancient drawing of mine doesn't represent what's in this article ... but it looks nice. Not so far from my dinky house, and well within the 3K, is The Flood. And in recent days, it has turned up some good stuff. And yesterday it had 2 Little Stints, 3 Curlew Sands, 3 Ruffs and 29+ Snipes. Along with the usual more ordinary stuff. The mix varied over the day. Snipes have had a rocky time since those two hard winters a decade ago .... they were wiped out almost completely for a couple of years, and have recovered very very slowly. That's the problem when you're a bird that relies upon sticking your long beak into sludgy mud. When it freezes up, you're stuffed. At Grumbling Stumps "they" lost all their Bitterns that way, but they didn't mention it so as not to put off the hordes of people who go there hoping to see one. After those two fierce winters I didn't hear or see one there for years ... and they've only recently made some sort of a comeback. The Bearded Tits vanished as well. They rely a lot on the fallen seeds for their winter food, and when the water and the mud all freezes they're stuffed. Strangely, it all more or less happened at the same time as that wonderful financial collapse hit us. And just as we were all hoping that we were about to crawl out of 10 years of austerity, we're going to collapse into another financial black hole. Everything is connected ! So .. a bit of temporary happiness, and quite a lot of gloomy stuff. But ... it's not dark yet ... Later in the day, I "got" a blasted Kingfisher at last... a male.
And about time too. Woo !
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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