Friday February 17

After a day spent doing "jobs" including some gardening, during which episode a Raven flew overhead, yesterday, I was keen to do some proper birding today.

I headed for Arrow Valley Lake, and quickly added a Grey Wagtail to my year list. I had two opportunities to photograph it, once by where a steam trickles into the lake, and once on the river Arrow, but I blew both of them.

The walk around the lake produced at least 13 Great Crested Grebes, just four Tufted Ducks, and surprisingly no Goosanders. At least one Grey Heron is incubating, and a pair of Cormorants were standing close by.

I managed to photograph one of the two singing Treecreepers this morning.

Treecreeper

One of the many dog-walkers asked me what I was photographing, and we had a chat about birds. She had seen up to seven Little Egrets roosting in the evening, which leads me to suspect that I did see seven, not six, on the one occasion I got here early enough to see them leaving the roost.

This Cormorant appears to be of the continental race, sinensis. The extent of the white feathering on the head was the way this sub-species used to be identified, but its not a completely reliable feature. However the angle of the line which forms a border between the skin at the gape and the feathering of the throat is meant to be diagnostic. This bird shows a shallow angle which supports its identification as sinensis.

As I understand it, quite a lot of sinensis birds now breed in trees in the south-east of the UK, while the atlantic race carbo is more typically coastal in distribution.