BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JWN Andrewes" data-source="post: 3558590" data-attributes="member: 7131">April 29th: part IReally fancied upgrading our views of Night Heron, what with the photos being posted of the Shrewsbury bird, so with a morning to spare we headed out early doors, arriving a little before 08:00, only to find the gates to the Dingle, a nicely planted hollow in the middle of a grassy park, all locked up. Not a problem it turned out, with the bird showing extremely well through one of the gates further round. In fact it is entirely possible that having its chosen habitat cleared of people every afternoon (from 17:15 according to the signs) has encouraged it to hang around, although having said that it was far from a wary bird. There was some sort of “fun run” (honestly, just because the words rhyme doesn’t mean they belong together) taking place, starting quite close to the Dingle, complete with loud-hailers, cheers, rounds of applause, all of which elicited barely a response from the Heron which seemed happy to just sit out in the open and snooze. One wonders how birds decide on the best place to chill, I mean, if this is the Venus Pools bird, well, then it couldn’t get deeper into cover, right bugger to see, and yet here it was brazen as all get out. It could easily have walked a couple of yards in and been completely hidden from sight (in fact it did just that at one point, completely vanished, and then just stalked back into view less than a minute later). Eventually someone came by and unlocked the Dingle, but to be honest the views had been so good from the gate that it didn’t make a massive difference, and the bird seemed happy to stick to its favoured spot in spite of an increased number of both observers and passers by.</blockquote>

Verification