Fairburn Fungus

We spotted quite an array of fungus at Fairburn at the weekend. I have to say this first one is the prettiest i've ever seen - if you can call them pretty!

Here are a some of the others we saw. The little one had quite a lot of fun trying to spot them before us.

Fairburn Ings

An afternoon at Fairburn yesterday proved to be quite a rewarding day bird wise and the little one enjoyed herself too, which is always good. The RSPB website now have a woodland bingo game that can be printed off for the reserve, which was a good way of making it more interesting, she was ticking things off pretty quick and used the back of it to draw birds on in the hide!

We walked down to the Lin Dyke hide first seeing Long Tailed Tits on the way. From the hide we saw Wigeon, Teal, my first ever Shovelers, Cormorants, Lapwing, a lone Mallard and a herd of the cattle that roam the fields there.

Lapwing
Onto the reserve by the visitor centre where we saw our first Tree Sparrows of the day. From the Pick up hide there was a lot of activity round the feeders from Goldfinch, Pheasants, Chaffinch, Great and Blue Tits. On the water we could see Moorhens, Mallards and overhead Kestrels.

The feeding station had all the usual birds plus Greenfinch with Mallards and a Moorhen picking up the dropped seed.

We ended up walking the entire lake and back along the road to the visitor centre. From the cut hide we saw Pochard, Great Crested Grebe, Wigeon, Tufted Duck, Lapwings, Shovelers, Wren and two new birds Gadwall and a Stock Dove.

Through the afternoon we also saw Mute Swans, Greylag and Canada Geese, Shelduck, Herons and plenty of Crows and Black Headed Gulls. There was a great abundance of fungus too, which i'll post separately as we saw so much.

In the Garden

It's been a busy couple of weeks in our garden. We have up to 24 Goldfinch, with over half of them juveniles in and around the feeders, Blue, Great and Coal Tits, Robins, Starlings, House Sparrows, Collared Doves, Woodpigeons, Greenfinch, Magpies. A rare visit from a Chaffinch a couple of times too. The Dunnocks have been a bit scarce but the past couple of days we've had two or three around. The Blackbirds are starting to show up again in the trees, not quite venturing into the garden yet but it's nice to see and hear them around.

There have even been two new garden firsts, yesterday a Chiffchaff, which to be fair spent most of the time in the neighbours garden but I did get a few blurry shots through the window and it did make in to mine just! This morning we had a Great Spotted Woodpecker in our tree, it wasn't there long enough to grab the camera unfortunately. I have never seen a Woodpecker in our town in the 8 years i've lived here so to get one in the garden albeit briefly is fantastic. Fingers crossed something on our feeder will entice it back again.

Gallows Hill

We spent Saturday afternoon walking around Gallows Hill in Otley until it got too muddy to keep going! The trees and bushes were laden with berries though we hardly saw any birds around taking advantage.

In fact we only saw the odd Woodpigeon and a lbj in the trees, which from this photo is most likely to be a Chiffchaff. Unfortunately it wasn't singing to no help there.

We got caught in a couple of rain showers, even though the sun was shining across the river. It produced this Rainbow just over the water, which my little one spotted. All the rain meant the river was pretty full and very fast flowing, we watched some ducks struggling against the current a while before they finally gave in and went with the flow.

A few of these strange looking plants were dotted about under the trees, I don't recall seeing anything like this before, any ideas?

This was the only fungus we saw and I had to pretty much sit in the mud to get a photo but I liked how it looked (I know who thought i'd get excited about fungus!).

Just to finish off with a few other shots from the day.