Tales From A Crowded Island

The last couple of weekends I have been to two of Yorkshire’s best reserves for bird-watching: Old Moor (RSPB) and Potteric Carr (Yorkshire Wildlife Trust). It was great to see that both of the sites had new hides added since my previous visits. Potteric Carr was a large reserve when I first went to it, but the new hides and reclaimed ground stretching almost all the way the the M18 make it incredibly impressive. Both sites also have great visitor centres that serve tasty and cheap fodder for you to refuel on before heading back out to the hides.

My trip to Old Moor was my first time around a RSPB reserve with Mum and Ralph, who had joined just a few weeks earlier at Leighton Moss. The weather – a blustery, chilling wind & occasional squally rain – may not have been kind to us, but we actually notched up quite a list, including a first tick for me. We started with the hide next to the visitor centre looking out over the bird feeders, which turned out to be surprisingly productive, ticking off a Coal Tit, a pair of Willow Tits and a pair of Bullfinches, of whom, the male looked rather ropey and bedraggled.

We tried the two new (well, new to me) hides first, taking a left when we left the visitor centre, towards the main road, instead of the more usual route to the more popular hides. It was quiet too; only a couple in the first hide we went in and no one in the second. That couple proved quite useful though, alerting us to a Water Rail skulking about in the reeds across the water to the left of the hide. Alas, as Water Rails have a want to be, it proved very elusive; everytime the couple shouted it was in view, by the time we had scooted across the hide it had disappeared again. Old Moor was where I saw my first Water Rail; a extrovert one apparently, as it strutted about for a good half hour right in front of the Wath Ings Hide.

I spotted a male Sparrowhawk in the trees directly opposite the hide and we got a good view before it got chased off my crows. Ralph re-spotted it in the same tree, but due to the inadequacy of his spatial description, none of us believed him for the first quarter of an hour, in spite of his insistency “there is something there!!”. A Kingfisher made a (very) fleeting appearance, flying across in front of the hide, and to top it off, we finally got to see the Water Rail briefly just before we left the hide. On the way back to the visitor centre for refueling, we got a glimpse of a Great Spotted Woodpecker flying away from us towards the visitor centre.

After lunch, we went down towards Wath Ings, stopping off in the large L shaped hide, but seeing only a Green Sandpiper, we moved on to Wath Ings hide. It was a relatively short stay, but we saw some good stuff. There were plenty of lapwings and plovers of course, but in amongst them there were four or five Ruff. We had apparently missed some Spotted Redshank that had been around earlier, but whilst we were there a group of waders circled and dropped down amongst the Lapwings. They were mainly Dunlin, but there was a Curlew Sandpiper too (only saw my 1st one of those a few weeks back at Fairburn Ings) and two Little Stint (a 1st for me!). We also saw Black Tailed Godwits, a solitary Greenshank and a second, better view of a Sparrowhawk as it swept through, causing general chaos as the Lapwings and Plovers went up. Not a bad days work all in all.

View over the West Scrape at Potteric Carr

Better weather for the outing to Potteric last weekend with Dad and Sandra, but less to see. First hide we went into was the Duchess Hide (hide 9 on this map), looking out over Huxter Well Marsh towards the M18. There seemed to be little about at first, aside from lapwings, plovers and some Jays busily collecting acorns from two Oak trees. Then Dad noticed there was a solitary wader amongst the lapwings. I managed to get the scope on it for a brief 30 seconds before it took off at speed, but didn’t manage to ID it (I am crap at waders), so it was one to check in the book when we got back home.

I was surprised as we worked are way around to the West Scrape (closest to M18) by the sudden appearance of so many Swallows and House Martins. We heard two Chiff Chaffs singing too. There looked to be very little about aside from Greylags when we first got into the hide overlooking West Scrape, but then we had an explosion of bird of prey activity. We spotted five Buzzards circling up on the thermals toward the A6182; a Sparrowhawk tangling with two of them, before soaring upwards itself, and then a Kestrel emerged from over the woods. We got even better views when we left the hide a short while later, as a female Sparrowhawk and a couple of Buzzards flew low over us.

Oh yeah, that mystery wader! When we got back to the visitor centre, we were told by the guy manning it that the Pectoral Sandpiper had been seen on Huxter Well that morning. He showed us some pictures of on the Potteric website, but I was still not totally convinced that is what we had seen from those pictures, but having checked the books and checked a few pictures online when I got back home, I am now pretty certain it was a Pectoral Sandpiper we saw. If it was, that would be another first for me.

Short footnote on the redesign of the RSPB website, or more specifically the pages dedicated to the individual reserves. I only just noticed tonight, whilst putting this blog together, how much improved these pages are. Take the Old Moor one here for example; not only does it look much cleaner in its layout than it used to, it is also obviously trying to establish a real Old Moor community microsite. The links bar on the left contains some of the same old stuff that used to be there (facilities, star species etc), but they have added prominent, socially engaging sections like the blog, a forum and a Twitter feed. Rather than just recent sightings, the blog covers them, adding details, a dash of humour and some personality. In fact, the whole RSPB online community offering has been, well unless I missed it all previously, very much bolstered in recent times. Registering gives you access to forums, blogs and photo sharing; all of which allows you to tap into the resources and knowledge of the wider RSPB community. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust who run Potteric Carr do not have anything similar, although they are on Facebook and Twitter. I imagine that regional Wildlife Trusts do not have the funds available that a big charity like the RSPB does, but could all the regional Wildlife Trusts create something between them that mirrors the RSPB online community? Could they not even work together with the RSPB to have a shared online community infrastructure? After all, many RSPB members will also be members of their local wildlife trust, and there would be a lot of benefits from having a bigger community of wildlife lovers, not least for focusing campaigning/volunteering.