Staveley

 Watching a news article about the bird flu on the Farne Islands. Distressing scenes and who knows what the impact will be on this years young!

Sunny afternoon on Thursday with a pleasant breeze and a fair amount of cloud cover, so I decided to visit Staveley. Plenty of space in the car park for a change. As I walked along the path that crosses the orchard I could see that the apples are growing on several trees.

From the first hide I could see lots of greylag geese, including this one with a neck band.

I could hear lots of lapwings, but was unable to see them until they all took to the air when a hobby flew over. I could see a few starlings in the flock of birds as they flew around, before landing back out of sight. Lots of dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies on the wing, not many of them settled long enough for me to take a picture.

From the second hide that I visited I could see the lapwings along with more geese, mallards, cormorants and coots.

Young black headed gulls were busy fishing and seemed to be collecting bits of reed!

I then walked around to the hide overlooking the west lagoon. A farmer was cutting the grass and a chap was standing near the edge of the water

Once he left, a greenshank, little ringed plover little egret, gadwall and shelducks returned to the area to feed. 

A pleasant couple of hours and a list of 40 birds for the visit.