Floods of birds

I wasted yesterday morning at Cotham Landfill - there were exactly zero gulls on the landfill itself, and I realised there weren't going to be when the bulldozer started receiveing a power-wash. This site always used to receive waste on a saturday morning, but it appears perhaps it doesn't anymore - I need a weekday visit...

Today was a bit more productive; nothing unusual in terms of species, but there were some big flocks of birds around Girton Pits, taking advantage of the standing water left from the floods (still extensive in places); Smithy Marsh, one of the holmes just south of Girton Pits, looked absolutely superb (almost like a piece of East Anglian coastal grazing marsh), with shallow pools and around 800 Golden Plover, with c.3-400 Lapwing and at least 30 Dunlin amongst them, plus a very fine Peregrine on the deck. And everywhere I looked there seemed to be parties of Lapwing, Goldies or ducks in flight. All that was missing from the scene were some wild geese/swans!

Smithy Marsh

At the other end of the site, there were several hundred more Golden Plover and Lapwing on the sheep fields around some more standing water, whilst on the Pits themselves, the Sailing Lake held most of the action. Water levels were very high, and there was a huge raft of wildfowl, probably numbering around 1500 birds; I counted 600 Wigeon but was saved the job of counting the Teal when the whole lot took flight (in response to a boat setting sail), but there were probably a similar number of these too, plus a single drake Pintail, decent numbers of Tufties and a few Pochard and Goldeneye. On the east side of the lake, "The Breach" had lived up to its name as it has been completely broken through by the flood waters, making the track impassable.

The sheep fields

The Sailing Lake with wildfowl in flight

The aptly named "Breach"

I wish I'd had a bit more time to spend out, but I didn't; I heard from John Ellis in the afternoon that he'd had a small party of grounded Pink-footed Geese on floods at Meering/Besthorpe NWT North, and some big numbers of Wigeon and Teal, plus 9 Pintail, on the Main Pit at Collingham - where water levels sound very high!