Tophill Low
Hi all
I though I would share my days birding at Tophill Low with you, hope you enjoy it, I had a really good day.
I have this week off work and today I visited Tophill Low. I have been a couple of times before but have not covered all the site in one visit. I got there about 10.30 and left about 4.00, walking around the whole site leisurely visiting all hides. I stayed in some hides for upto 1 hour others only ten minutes or so, the reserve was very quite and I only saw three people on the way round.
The usual ducks were on the D reservoir including Golden eye, Wigeon , Tufted Duck, Ruddy duck, Mute swans, blackheaded Gulls and a Red throated Diver. Crows, rooks, jackdaws and pigeons flew over the reservoir. I then walked back through the car park, on the way to north and south lagoons, spying two great spotted woodpeckers chasing each other around the trees. Very little were on the lagoons just coots and moorhens.
Moving on to go to watton borrow pits a mixture of long tailed tit, blue, great and coal tit were flitting in and out of the trees along with gold crest. Reed buntings were in the scrub before the hawthorn trees. A brown rat was under the hawthorn trees (not my favourite sighting of the day) From the hide several graylag geese were along the far edge of the water ,a single great crested grebe was busy feeding along with cormorant, teal and mallard . A heron and pochard flew in. A kingfisher flew across and landed in a bush in front of the hide near the dividing strip of land between the two areas of water and dived into the water and caught a fish. The fish was quite large and the kingfisher seemed to struggle to fly back up into the bush so it flew along the waters edge to a bush that was lower. A flock of about 50 lapwing were circling the site but they didn’t settle. Every time they appeared to choose a spot to land they took off again, they were joined by approx 150 golden plover and continued to circle round, this went on for about a half hour, I left them and moved on to south marsh.
The water levels were very low with a lot of mud /soil showing, a group of redshank were feeding in mud, along with pied wagtails. Birds in the water were moorhen, coot and shovellers, to the far left of the hide some distance away was a channel of water I noticed some movement along the right hand bank and after getting my scope I could confirm that I was watching a water rail. (my favourite sighting of the day)
Having walked all round “O” reservoir I decided to walk around “D” reservoir and the “D” wood seeing chaffinch, wrens, tree creeper, robins and several gold crests alas no firecrest. From north marsh hide there appeared to be very little about, I heard a noise of moving reeds below the hide I stood up and looked down and in a ditch just in front of the hide was a water vole. It was biting off stems of reeds and eating them. I walked on towards north hide on “D” reservoir a barn owl flew along the edge of the wood and I saw a bullfinch in a bush, I walked back along the drain side towards the carpark a sparrow hawk flew along the drain and I saw a pair of English partridge in the field beyond the drain.
I had a very enjoyable day and saw 51 birds species 4 animals species and one butterfly and dragonfly, I didn’t see roe deer this time.
Cheers Julie