May 1 2025 was a nice hot day and I decided to go to RSPB St Aidans where you can walk along paths around reed beds and ponds with absolutely no shade. By the time you have walked around to Astley Lake Oddball, the dragline from when it was a mine, is way in the distance. If nothing else it does mean that the wildlife can enjoy a lot of space.
As usual you can tap/touch/click on an image, not its caption, to see it in better quality in the gallery. And if you like what you see please click on one or more of the Share buttons at the bottom.
St Aidans
Of course I was listening for the boom of Bittern, and I was not disappointed, but as you walk by the reeds the volume coming from Cetti’s Warbler, Reed Warbler and Sedge Warbler is astonishing. Seeing them is another matter. Walking slowly and pausing for a minute or two certainly helped. One of them belting out within a few feet of you can be startling. Picking the camera up slowly and trying to find it in the reeds of branches is then the challenge.
The other noisy ones were the Black Headed Gulls. Plenty of them could be seen carrying grass for nests for them to then disappear in long grass amidst a lot of shouting from their fellow nest sitters.
Reed Bunting were also singing and tended to be much more visible at the tops of bushes. Much quieter though.
The Linnet were much quieter. I think I only heard them when something disturbed them.
I had been hearing Bittern and kept looking at the reed beds without much hope of spotting one. But then the Blackheaded Gulls seemed to make more noise than usual and looking over towards the noise I could see two Bittern in flight. I managed to get one of them in the viewfinder.
The other highlights of the visit were two families with Goslings, a Great Crested Grebe family, and over on Astley Lake a Little Ringed Plover and several Ruff. The Ruff have to be looked for, the Gulls tend to take your eye first.
Fairburn Ings
After St Aidans I spent a few minutes at Fairburn Ings. I walked to the Kingfisher screen but didn’t see any. In the past I had effectively had a guided walk through fields to see Spoonbill but now the route is along the paths and, after being out in the open at St Aidans, that was going to be too much. However I did see a Whitethroat on the power cables near the car park.
If you are using a phone the caption can take up most of the space of the thumbnail so you might find it easier to turn your phone to landscape to open the gallery. I am hoping to change that for the site.
You can also leave comments or subscribe to the site – leave your email address and you will get notified when I publish something new.
The images are published under the Creative Commons, BY-NC-SA license. Feel free to share them, edit them, but please keep my name in the credits.
Leave a Reply