A New Years Treat!

This is the first of my 3 posts that I need to get done about the first week of January's Birding. Well, on New Years Day, we headed down to North Warren in the morning, and Minsmere in the afternoon. If you looked at the Daily Sightings Page, you may have gathered what we saw that day, but for those of you who haven't, I won't spoil it for you now. I get on with the pictures and videos then. We started off the day with a Pheasant with an Albino bird in Coddenham.

We then got to North Warren Car park, and a nice surprise was a female Stonechat in the grass

We then got to the path across the field and we parked our scope mid-way down, and scanned for the Red-breasted Goose (and the three feral birds) amongst the Barnacles. Well here's what we got.

I believe that this is the wild bird but I'm not sure.

I'm not that fussed to know which one is the wild bird in these two photo's because I know it's one of them. These are 4 individual birds. The wild bird was a 1st-winter, and the 3 feral birds were adults. We also saw White-fronted Geese.

And Barnacles...

And then we saw some ducks, including some Pintail, but a little distant.....

And we finished with some Lapwings...

We then moved onto Minsmere, and we started with food in the cafe, then we moved onto North Hide. We didn't see the Waxwings in North Bushes, but some ducks were added to my year list including 4 Smew..

There was 4 birds (another Redhead), but she wandered off!

Then we went to Island Mere, meaning we missed out of the rest of the hides due to flooding. We didn't go up to south levels either to see the Bean Geese, because of time. We got a few Marsh Harriers and missed a Bittern by 30 seconds :( 

We then got 3 cracking Bullfinch's!

We got to Bittern Hide at Dusk, and with 4 Bewick's Swan flying over, we didn't expect to have 2 Otters fishing on the lake and river...

Happy New Year