A quiet weekend

All in all, a fairly low-key weekend. On Friday I joined Peter Alfrey at Beddington for a couple of hours. We enjoyed the (very white) juvenile Glaucous, the regular juvenile Iceland and a chunky first-winter Caspian among the large numbers of gulls using the (for now) still-active landfill site. I also glimpsed a Mediterranean Gull, which I think gripped Pete off a bit as they've gone very scarce here in winter.

Glaucous Gull flies in front of the Beddington 'Death Star' - much more on this obscenity at Pete's blog.

On Sunday I popped over to see the Horned Lark at Staines, but it was favouring the south side of the causeway and, on a bright morning, was therefore into the sun all the time. The drake Greater Scaup was on show at the north-west end of the South Basin. Then, in the afternoon, I headed over to the WWT, which was pretty quiet - a 2cy Yellow-legged Gull was as good as it got.

The only thing I photographed at Staines on Sunday - A380 aircraft always look impressive in the air!

Quiet day in the woods

After a couple of great days I guess I was due a slow one, and that's exactly how today panned out. My recent success (in fact, pretty much all of it on Corvo in the past four years) has been in the more open areas - fields, open valleys etc. So far this trip I'd managed to avoid going deep in to any of the wooded ribeiras altogether but that changed today when Pierre dragged me in to Cancelas. Three hours working up the valley produced absolutely nothing, though in the calm and sunny weather it certainly felt promising. Later I tried the southern fringes of do Vinte and also the top half of da Ponte. Nothing. Zilch. Sod all. There were a few new birds seen by others today though.

Woods. Too much time in the woods.