NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

After all of that pan-species malarky I thought that I'd better get back out birding before my bins and scope were confiscated and I was publicly pronounced 'lapsed'. Beddingtom Sewage Farm was my venue of choice. The birding reflected the weather, being non-descript and dull with the odd bright spell. A single Water Pipit gave itself up along with 7 Green Sandpipers. A feature of the farm these days is the gathering of feeding and loafing Grey Herons, no fewer than 88 being on show, mostly on the islands of the north lake. As always, Tree Sparrows took advantage of the well-stocked feeders. I did grill the gulls although nothing got the pulse racing. I read two colour rings - TJ6T black lettering on red, left leg of an adult Lesser BB Gull - plus AV71 black lettering on orange, left leg of a first-winter Herring - but my quick look on the European colour ringing website failed to identify where they might have been ringed. The first-winter Common Gull (above) is a ...

I spent most of the day at Beddington SF as I now have become a member of the bird group, and have a key to enter the site. The two 'new' lakes are the obvious focus of the site, but I was delighted to see that some of the old-fashioned sludge lagoons (picture above) remain from 'back in the day'. I wandered the banks of these lagoons in the 1970s and 80s, and doing so again today brought back many happy memories. It was all still there - the rank vegetation, the Beddington pong (a mixture of green growth and sewage) and the birds. I flushed Green Sand, Common Sand and Snipe from these beds which will always to me be Beddington birds. Elsewhere on the farm was a Ruff, Rock Pipit, good counts of Teal and three Beddington ticks - Common Buzzard, Ring-necked Parakeet and Egyptian Goose! A clear illustration that the passing of time does indeed change local bird populations, so that you can bowl up sixteen years later and add birds to the area list with gay abandon.