Burrator and a River Exe Boat Trip

Tuesday 21st January and we finally got to have our New Years walk around Burrator Reservoir on what was a sunny, calm and frosty morning. Considering the good weather it wasn't too busy and I managed to see some good birds on our walk

The reservoir was full with a trickle of water flowing over the dam and out on the water were a cormorant, 2 Canada geese, a white farmyard goose, mallards, 4 black-headed gulls and 3 male, 2 female mandarin ducks.

Mandarins, Burrator Reservoir

The woods held more interest with a marsh tit and a treecreeper seen along with the usual goldcrest, coal tit, nuthatch, great tit, blue tit, wren, siskin, robin and chaffinch. The highlights though were a brambling feeding on pine cone seeds high up in the trees amongst the chaffinches before it flew off out of sight and 2 singing crossbills unfortunately heard only as they sang out of sight in the tree tops. I did however get a brief flight view of a male crossbill as it flew over calling and I also heard another bird fly over but couldn't locate it.

Brambling (Honest!), Burrator

Wednesday 22nd January and it was time again to head up to Exmouth with Mavis for our annual River Exe cruise with Stuart Lines. The clear skies and sunshine from the day before had been replaced with dull and grey mist and a bit of drizzle, not ideal at all, but the boat trip was as good as ever and the mist did eventually clear a little allowing some good views of the birds in eerie and atmospheric conditions.

Waders were well represented with avocet, black-tailed godwit, knot, dunlin, oystercatcher, curlew, redshank, sanderling, snipe, greenshank, bar-tailed godwit, grey plover, lapwing, golden plover, turnstone and ringed plover all seen. Herbert the Slavonian grebe was in the usual place with a little grebe for company and great crested grebes were seen all along the river including a loose group of 12 birds. Wigeon, pintail, mallard, shelduck, teal and red-breasted merganser were also on show and a pair of black swans at Topsham Quay were very exotic looking on a murky and cold day in Devon.

 Avocets in the Mist, River Exe

 Shelduck, River Exe

 Sanderling, River Exe

Black-tailed Godwits and Black-headed Gulls, River Exe

After the boat trip we had out usual stop off at Bowling Green Marsh on the drive back to Plymouth and it still had large patches of the open water covered in ice. However out on the Marsh we found pintail, coot, wigeon, teal, mallard, shoveler and moorhen along with 2 male, 2 female pochard and a male scaup, my first sighting of one on the Marsh. A few curlew, a snipe and a few redshank were seen along with Canada geese and greylag geese while brent geese flew over between Darts Farm and the estuary in noisy flocks. A quick look off the River Clyst viewing platform on the incoming tide and we found 3 greenshank and a lone snipe looking a bit out of place on the mudflats amongst the usual waders.

 Shoveler, Bowling Green Marsh

Pintail, Bowling Green Marsh

There was no sign of the long-billed dowitcher on the marsh or on the estuary but a nice surprise was a female type marsh harrier which flew in to the marsh as the light began to fade and after circling over the reedbeds for a few minutes it disappeared into the reeds to presumably roost for the night.

Stock dove, chiffchaff, mistle thrush and long-tailed tit were all seen along the lane as well and as we began the drive home after a great day out we had seen 60 species of birds, not bad at all.