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How local is your local patch? (1 Viewer)

RockyRacoon

Well-known member
How close to you to your local patch, I only have about a 30 second walk! How big is it, is it a few acres, or few square miles? I don't know what other people local patches are like!
 
hmm... depends on what i want to see. for most species i need to travel about 5mile to derwent valley. for sea species its about 6mile to the coast or if i fancy the local river (tyne) thats just 1mile away. not bad really, as i can do a round trip and see more species in a day than most people in a week!
 
Mine is one minute's walk from where I work, 15 minutes in the car from where I live. Size - it is the Irish Sea so it's quite big...

Stephen.
 
Local woodland, 10 mins walk. Covers 6 miles.

To do any marshland birding its a 30 min drive to the coast road near southport, so not bad.
 
10 mins to walk to wood's

Darrenom said:
6 miles in 10 minutes!!! Blinkin' 'ell!

BERT!! What you taking and can I have some?;)
you sure can when i find it, :bounce: have yet to do the full tour! and in 10min :eek!:
 
Remember Jake, Local patches are for local people.;)

My local patch is a good 40 minute walk away, then a 4 mile trek around a featureless boating lake and a couple of old claypits interspersed with scrub and open woodland. There's also a reedbed the size of a pool table, (which has hosted Cetti's Warbler plus both tristis and abietinus Chiffchaff- a probable of the latter this morning).

If I've learned anything, make sure you have a good pair of walking boots and be patient!

The whole thing takes about 4 hours, but I am slow!

Happy birding!
 
Jane Turner said:
Mine is 7 to ten minutes walk away and takes 20 mins to walk round once and I've seen 240 species there.... how lucky am !

wow! - impressive. you sure it aint a rspb reserve? if not it should be. ;)
 
Mine is the local canal. I hop on the number 1 bus and ride out to Halberton from Tiverton about four miles away then do a six/seven mile walk back home on a twisty canal. Love it to bits!

Where's me saddo certificate!?
 
Mine is five minutes' walk from the house and the walk round it is only a mile or two. There's a flooded chalk pit, a bushy railway embankment and a bit of rough grassland.

What I like about it is how trivial records here (appearance of a gadwall and a pochard among the usual tufties) are part of impressive national events (major wave of duck migration).

James
 
Five minute's walk - if I could go up the garden of the house opposite and then down the next garden it would be two minutes!

Cross over a railway footbridge and... well the bridge looks over the overgrown railway banks so I'm already started by then. Straight after the bridge is a timber yard in a former farmyard but they also have stabling for horses - so Swallows around here and Wagtails, including the odd Grey around the manure heap.

The footpath/farm track goes down towards the local common and woodland area but being between the railway and the horse-fields there's often plenty to see including Redpolls and Siskins sometimes, on birch trees, Thrushes, Green Woodpecker, Goldfinches (on Thistles) in the fields plus all the usual hedgerow species.

So there's plenty very locally without ever reaching the woods or common! - see this link to the common area: http://www.lros.org.uk/burbage.htm
 
Mine's sort of all around the house really. I live in a semi-rural village, quite close to town (Leamington Spa). To the south it's mixed farmland, mainly arable but some livestock - home to Yellowhammer, Linnet, Buzzard, Lapwing and Fieldfare etc - and one day (I hope) my first Corn Bunting!

To the north it's the Leam river valley and local nature reserve, mixed woodland, open grassland, a canal and more.

Either side takes me a good couple of hours or more to trek around, wouldn't fancy doing the whole lot in one day.

It looks a great patch, but despite having been here a year now I've not put nearly enough hours in to get the best out of it. Too much time heading off to established reserves and birding hotspots (not that you'd know it from my life / year lists).

My resolution for 2005 is to work my patch thoroughly for the full 12 months. Who knows what it may hold?
 
We have good terrain more of a climb than a walk, with some interesting species the resident pair of Peregrines in the valley to the game birds in the moorland along the Southern Upland way.

Local loch about 500m has a few water birds and small songbirds; there are a lot of Buzzards in our area.
 
Karwin said:
My local patch is a 200 kilometer drive away (because I have recently moved). It covers some ten square kilometres.

Seems us Baltic types have got it rough - all you back in Blighty talk of your 5 or 10 minute walks, my regular local patch is 40 km away, but still manage to visit almost every other day. New 'local patch' is 75 km away but it really is MY local patch - 'cos just become owner of 35 hectares of forest and meadow.
Mind you, if local patch can include garden birding, then my kitchen step is pretty good - Crested Tits, Golden Orioles, Lesser Spotted Eagles over, Bitterns calling, Rosefinch by the pond, etc :)
 
My local patch begins on the southern edge of Saint Joseph, Missouri, USA. It is where Lake Contrary is situated. My patch includes about a 16 square mile area. Some features of this area are: Lake Contrary, a couple of other small oxbow lakes, the Missouri River (with riverside woods), some residential areas, cultivated "bottom land" and some farms. My "list" total for this area is 228 species. I usually do quite a bit of the birding from my vehicle, but I do get out a walk some. The area is probably 95 percent private property so doing "a lot of walking" is not really an option. I have established good rapport with quite a few of owners of the properties in this area. This gives me considerable more accessibility to certain areas within "my patch". My usual birding day in the area commences at about 7:30/8:00 AM and continues until about 12:30 PM.

 
I guess for me it would be Thousand Hills State Park, which is about 7 miles west of my university in Kirksville, MO. It's mostly a hilly oak-hickory forest with a small lake (about 570 acres...it gets passed over by most migrating waterfowl) and a few pine plantations. The park itself is a bit over 3000 acres, but a good part of it is inaccessible without hiking about six miles. Luckily, there seems to be pretty good birding along the park road and on short one-two mile hikes around the lake.
 
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