Danebury & Red Rice - 25th Jan

This will be a bit of a first for me, a no photo blog post! Some of you might say all the better. After being office bound all week due to the snow, the previous day I had seen on Going Birding for Hampshire that quite some big numbers of Farmland birds had been seen within 10 mins of work.

That pretty much sorted my friday lunchtime. I was soon out the office door and off towards Danebury Hillfort. The large flat fields on the Danebury road resulted in nothing more than the odd Buzzard and around 2000 Rook.

Spying a rough piece of set aside cover next to a fairly low hedge row on the smaller road back towards town I took a punt pulling up in the gateway. Not having the camera with me it was quite nice for a change to make use of the scope. With plenty of Snow still covering the surrounding fields this hedge row proceeded to erupt with flock upon flock of small birds as they fed on the cover crop next door before returning to perch back upon the hedge.

Yellowhammer were the easiest to ID, with the bright yellow breasts and heads glowing against the dark hedgerow. With the odd pause in movement, I started to make out Corn Bunting, Reed Bunting, Linnet & Dunnock amongst the throngs. And more interestingly a Buzzard perched on a fence post mid hedge right in amongst them all.

With the constant movement it was pretty tricky to get an accurate count but if I had to roughly estimate I'd say

c.250 Yellowhammer
c.370 Corn Bunting
c.200 Linnet
c.22 Reed Bunting
8 Dunnock

All in all quite pleasant just to do a little bit of Birdwatching without having to worry about photographing it all. However I was a little gutted I missed out on some relevantly close shots of some Yellowhammers.

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