27th January

Just a few snippets from around and about today: the continuing Black Redstarts at the Bill, Southwell and Blacknor, a Grey Plover around the oyster-racks at Ferrybridge and the 2 Red-necked Grebes still in Portland Harbour.

Having reached a tricky point in a job we were doing elsewhere at the Bill we decided on a bit of a whim to just dwell on the issue for a while and go over and have a look for Freddy Allway's Richard's Pipit at Pirate's Cove, beside the Fleet just up from Ferrybridge - they've become a really infrequent bird at Portland to the extent that we were struggling to remember the last one we saw here. In the event it took a little while to find but once discovered it showed quite well; frustratingly, because we hadn't really planned on going we didn't have any recording gear in the car so dipped out on what could have been some nice recordings as it called repeatedly whenever it took flight © Martin Cade:






And editing that little bit of video reminded us that we'd never got round to uploading some video of the Reap Lane Cirl Bunting from last weekend - it's presumably still about but we're not aware anyone's actually looked for it this week © Martin Cade: