Natural Selection

Between junior parkrun and my parents coming round I only had an hour or so for birding today. I decided to look for Pinkfeet in the Singleton / Windy Harbour area, where I had seen some in passing yesterday. There were perhaps 1500 or so in a field so I parked carefully off road and had a butchers.

I think it was Stuart Darbyshire in his blog who said there was nothing more therapeutic than scanning through grazing geese. I wasn’t convinced at the time, but it’s something I am increasingly coming round to. The generally tolerant dances as family groups move past each other in their feeding rhythms are absorbing, harmony occasionally broken by a brief turf spat before everything settles down again. There was no sign of any other species among them, but I’m not complaining as I’ve done well in that regard recently.

The parkrun I help organise is on the north Blackpool seafront at Anchorsholme. It gets a few migrants as most coastal parks do. About fifteen Meadow Pipits are wintering, maybe more as they are dispersed across the site. The flock of Linnet / Twite I saw last week were more obliging today, with 16 Linnets confirmed. At some point I will do a piece on birds I’ve seen on parkruns, as there have been some amazing highlights (well one in particular).

If anybody was on tenterhooks about yesterday’s mystery bird it was a Bar-headed Goose hiding behind a hedge. Here is a picture of the same individual earlier in the year at the same site.