Feb 5th Strumpshaw Fen & Feb 8th Hickling Broad

Feb 5th  Strumpshaw Fen

Bearded Tit

It was a very pleasant Wednesday morning. There was a feeling that spring was on its way. Snowdrops cover one tiny section of the woodland trail white with their drooping flowers. Woodpeckers were drumming, treecreepers were singing their trill of a song as they spiral around tree trunks, while blossom were forming on some of the shrubs. During my morning walk, I spooked a sparrowhawk taking a drink at a flooded pool, taking flight before I even realised it was even there and I encountered some reed bunting feeding on the ground at the end of the Sandy Wall path. Then on the way back from a silent Fen Hide, I came across a bearded tit pinging from the edge of a reedbed while a Chinese water deer grazed from the stubble of an opened up area nearby. Other than that, it was marsh harriers, buzzards and mallards and gadwall from Reception Hide. Oh, and Percy the pheasant was definitely alive after last week's pheasant shoot and very much hungry as usual.

Feb 8th  Hickling Broad

Mum and I went for a morning visit to Hickling Broad today in the hope of finding another bird I've surprisingly never photographed before. Scaup are very scarce winter visiting diving ducks that can be best described as a combination of a pochard and a tufted duck. The male looks like a pochard but with a green head, while the female looks like a female tufted duck without the tuft and a broader white patch at the base of the bill. I haven't seen a scaup in a while and I've never gotten a decent photo of one. The last photo I got of one was while it was asleep a few years ago, which is not worth keeping.

I've been hearing on and off reported sightings throughout the last couple of weeks of a pair of scaup being at Hickling. This happens to be my second visit in search of them. Sadly though, just as with that previous visit, I left disappointed. This is a duck that prefers open water, but after scanning every tufted duck and pochard out on the broad, I just couldn't pick a scaup out from amongst any of them. However, I did hear plenty of bearded tit action as well as some very distant bugling of cranes and saw a snipe. Better consolation than anything, I guess.