Water Rail

What a day! This morning I travelled to Arundel to visit the WWT. The last time I visited it was an ice rink and most of the water was frozen! Thankfully this time the ground and water were ice-free. Before heading to any of the hides, I had a wonder along the reed bed path. It is an amazingly peaceful walk. As I rounded one of the corners wading in the water in front of some of the reeds was a Water Rail! It was what I was hoping to see, well that and a Bittern. No luck on the Bittern but the Water Rail was beautiful and I had a fantastic 4-5 minute encounter. Some of the pictures I took are down below. A few extra ones are on my Flickr account, link on the right. After some lunch, brought from the café at the WWT (very tasty!), I headed on to Brighton for a spot of Starling watching. 20000-30000 Starlings must have showed up! As always amazing to watch! The only downside was that it was cloudy and not the best for photography, still I got some good pictures. I will be uploading the best from my 2 Brighton trips in the near future.

Andy

Snow!

It’s been a while since I wrote on here! I had a very hectic week leading up to and out of Christmas! So as I didn’t get a chance to post before Christmas; Merry Christmas to you all and I hope you had a wonderful time! My Christmas was fantastic, though went by far to quickly! Secondly, Happy new year and I hope you all had a great time on New years eve and day! My new year was also good, my brother was down from Glasgow with his family. It was brilliant to see them and catch up!

On to the main reason for the blog! As I am sure you have all noticed it has snowed! A lot! I have spent the day taking pictures, so there are fair few I am posting today. My first mission was to photograph the birds that frequent our garden to use the feeders. I spent an hour photographing the little birds. They were very active in and around the garden. As has now become my standard exercise, the larger versions of the pictures are on my Flickr account, link on the right!

My second mission for the day was to get some general pictures of the snow. It was great fun walking through the snow! I would have liked to have travelled a bit further but I set out a bit late and the light started to disappear and then the heavy snow started again, so it was back to the house to warm up!

That’s all the snow pictures for now. Though according to the weather forecast we maybe getting more over the weekend, so more maybe coming.

The last bit of news is that I travelled down to Brighton just after the last snow 2 weeks ago to watch the starlings over the old burnt down pier. It was an amazing sunset and a good display. I would have liked to have seen more starlings in the group though, but most of the them headed to the pier a bit further down the shore from me. I should get the pictures uploaded in the next week for you all to see. I am hoping to fit in another few trips in to see the starlings in the coming week, either at Brighton or Slimbridge.

Andy