Saturday morning arrived, with Kevin Heath and I deciding to drop in to Boddington Reservoir on our way to Draycote Water - with migration in full swing it is always possible that something of interest may pop up on one of our local bodies of water.
The car park was surprisingly busy as we arrived at just after sunrise - we really never found out why but noted there were already several fishmen on the water's edge. We had planned to just walk up as far as the boat club but after finding nothing much on the water we investigated the fields behind and the banks all the way up to the dam. We encountered various thrushes, including five redwing over, great spotted woodpecker and at least two jays along the hedgerow.
Cetti's warbler could be heard over towards Byfield Pool and as we headed back to the car, we encountered a treecreeper but were limited to viewing through bins and not showing well enough for a photo.
In just over 20 minutes we arrived at Draycote Water and decided that we would limit our initial parking fee to cover two hours. We climbed up to the footpath and I thought we might make our way round the reservoir in a clockwise direction - Kevin thought the opposite and we went with his hunch. We set off along Farborough Dam, watching for the red-breasted merganser that had been reported of late. We couldn’t help being distracted by small flocks of meadow pipit on the slopes to our right - but were on a mission. As we rounded the corner of the dam we could see numbers of cormorant fishing - I commented that things were looking good for seeing the merganser here - in fact many of my best views of visiting great northern divers have been around this spot. Just moments later Kevin drew my attention to the red-breasted merganser fishing ahead. A result!
We pushed on thinking that we would visit the hide and see what might be viewed from there. Before we reached it we picked out three female goldeneye and then a single male - due to the Covid lockdown last spring I didn't visit any large reservoirs and so these were my first of the year.
We entered the hide and scanned Toft Bay. There were numbers of teal and wigeon on the water's edge and a few gulls - investigating the gulls there were the usual black-headed and a common gull which was on the wing and departed. The remaining gulls included a juvenile great black-backed gull and another bird which piqued my interest. I started taking photos and found the bird was a Caspian gull with maybe some herring gull genes thrown in for good measure.
It had been a great morning, but it was time to start back to make sure we didn't exceed our parking time limit. Another birder chatted to us as we left, and we let him know he'd missed the merganser and he followed us back until we pointed out the birds location to him. We didn't have much time to stop but were afforded views of a couple of stonechats in the hedgerow at the foot of the slope. 31 species at Boddington and 34 at Draycote.
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