Thank you all and Merry Christmas. Onwards and upwards... and disregarding Ms Andrews' advice, begin with yesterday rather than the beginning.
Clare and I, obviously stir-crazy after the obligatory family socialising on 25th, skipped off to the New Forest via Romsey where a couple of Hawfinches are frequenting Mercer Way again. We missed those (I think I heard one) but encountered a Brown Rat scuttling along the edge of a brook below the unseasonal Lesser Celandine blooms.
From there we headed for Blashford, but Clare mentioned that she still hadn't seen Red Deer and it was all she needed for a full set of British deer in 2015: so we turned left and down to Puttles Bridge car park South of Rhinefield House. From there we intended to walk up to the edge of Ober Heath but we didn't get there because there Clare spotted two Red Deer stags, one five- and one six-pointer, at the edge of the fenced refuge in the woods that gives them a retreat when the area is over-run with grockles.
They were less than 50 yards away and standing stock-still, so it was cameras into action. Not much light but with a tripod and stationary subjects, so what? When they did move it was only slowly, and they didn't spook as we shifted about for better views. Eventually, however, they detected other people coming - with dogs - and walked calmly to the fence, did standing jumps clean over it and cantered away for about a hundred yards, pausing to look back before disappearing into the forest.
As they had two Dalmatians and were heading to where the deer had disappeared, I mentioned the fact to the couple passing. They stopped and told us the pair were probably two stags known to hang out together all the time, known to the rangers as Wills and Harry. They also mentioned a herd of about 20 hinds and youngsters up the track, so we ambled up there and took a few pics of them, although they were lurking some way from the track.
We never made it to Ober Heath, instead resuming our journey to Blashford. Before reaching there Clare found about twenty Fallow Deer in a hillside paddock near Mockbeggar Lake. We stopped to have a look from a gateway and found that the near field was crawling with Redwings - but there were no rare thrushes hiding amongst them. At Blashford we started in Tern Hide where Clare found the Slavonian Grebe and I picked out an adult Yellow-legged Gull. We then drove down to Hurst Road and spent half an hour peering through gaps in the trees to spot a drake Ferruginous Duck on Kingfisher Lake. We finished in Ivy Lake North staking out Bittern but to no avail, and had an easy run home in very light traffic.
A great Boxing Day out!
John