Carsington not cancelled!
11th January 2024
Having cancelled Carsington in December (owing to extremely windy weather), we rearranged for a chilly, but dry January. The plan was sent out in advance, as one does, but travel arrangements were hastily rearranged when Jo realised she would be arriving at the crack of dawn! Helen M forgot to send her message to Helen J who, by the time she received it, was actually back home. Don't we just love the dodgy signals up there!
So, the only person completely in tune with what was going on was Pam. Except.... she'd forgotten her binoculars and Jo had forgotten her flask. Luckily I was prepared and they both were furnished with the appropriate items.
As I started to say, Pam was on form and gained the first bird of the day; a robin. We headed towards the Visitor Centre bird hide and stopped to admire a pair of brightly coloured bullfinch. The arrow on the sign pointing to the exact spot where they were flitting about. At this point I realised my camera was in Jo's car boot. Jo kindly popped back to get it and missed the nuthatch. Ooops...
Imagine the bullfinch please....
Jo takes a fabulous shot of the bird hide showing blue sky, but there was a lowish drizzle across the water which made it difficult for good views of birds not right infront of us. However, we bagged a lot of great crested and little grebes, mallards, and jackdaws doing strange things on the bird feeders.
Notice how high the water is. No hosepipe ban later on then? Hmmm
Wonder how the tufted duck got its name?!
There was a teal in here somewhere.
Because we'd faffed about a bit, we decided to head towards Stone Island rather than take a longer walk.
We've seen all these already!
Time to move on
We looked at a mound of mud which is dutifully signposted as a 'barrow'. In fact it is the Hognaston Bronze Age Barrow, obviously named because all the plants around it are a lovely wintry bronzy sort of colour.
Pam impersonating a 'michelin' woman!
We arrive at Janet Ede hide and I immediately regretted not collecting the promised telescope. But by the time we'd managed to open the windows, with the catches carefully designed to be out of reach, the possible Great Northern Diver had dived. A later check with my new chums from the Derbyshire Birders fb private group, confirmed that the GND had been around early in the morning, in that exact spot! If only we'd all been up at the crack of dawn... ho hum, another time.
It might have looked like this!
By this time, Helen M had worked out where we were and came with news of Lynn's absence. It was quite fitting that very early on we had talked about post-menopausal-waterworks-coming-of-age problems but were saddened to learn that Lynn's issue cannot be fixed by a few 'tena ladies' and crossed legs! Hope the de-humidifiers work Lynn and that we see you soon.
Various combinations of carrot and parsnip soup, cheese scones and bacon butties filled our rumbling tummies and Julia arrived as we all settled into our hot drinks. Our main topics of conversation were about the etiquette of being a good grandparent, missing conversation in a second language (hope that's not going to be a future GB special day!) and the scarily developing technologies in cars ( but we did agree that if you need glasses to drive, they need to be worn!). When our usual topics cropped up, we briefly thought about Janice and Alison on slippery slopes and Charlotte in the sun.
Talking and listening!
Most of the group decided it was time to get home, leaving me to try for a few more birds but I only heard about ones we'd missed.. why do birders do that?! I did find a couple of butterflies though.
Terrifying!!
28 birds to start us off for the year. Hope that's a good omen.
black headed gulls
blackbird
blue tit
bullfinch (colourful bird of the day)
canada geese
coot
cormorant
crow
dunnock
goldfinch
great crested grebe
house sparrow
jackdaw
little grebe
long tailed tit
magpie
mallard
moorhen
nuthatch
oystercatcher (HM)
redshank (flying near Stone Island)
pheasant
pochard
robin
teal
tufted duck
woodpigeon
wren
