Waxwing double-whammy!

The plan this morning was to have a quick scout round Collingham and Besthorpe to look for big white herons (see yesterday's post), and then do the gulls at Cotham. However, there seemed to be lots of birds around, and I ran out of time for any gulling!

At Collingham, yesterday's Dunlin had been joined by a second, and there were still 6 Redshank present, and the drake Pintail. Moving on to Mons Pool, there was a large group of Snipe on the 'scrape' - repeated counting eventally got their numbers up to 58.

Part of the group of 58 Snipe at Mons Pool

There were also two Little Egrets present, and a colour-ringed Cormorant bearing a yellow ring marked Z87 (or possible ZB7?) - I'll follow this up, but I imagine it's another bird from Rutland Water (see this post).

Colour-ringed Cormorant

I then heard a familiar call coming from the top of an ash tree  in the hedge along the southern boundary of the site - 5 Waxwings! Unfortunately, they couldn't have been more against the light if they'd tried, so I could only manage some pretty poor record shots - but great birds to catch up with at last! I watched then for about five minutes, around 9.50am, before they flew off north. A short time later a Crossbill flew over north as well.

Waxwing at Mons Pool

I then had a second Waxwing encounter in the afternoon - my hockey match at the Magnus School in Newark had just started, when 7 Waxwings flew in and landed in some trees next to the pitch - a bit of a distraction when playing striker!