Sunday 3 January 2010

Marton Mere - 3rd January 2010

Drake Ring Necked Duck with Pochard, Tufted Duck, Mallard, Coot and Teal.
1 of 3 Long Eared Owl
Fieldfare

An early morning trip to Marton Mere with Chris Piner was in order to seek out the ever present Cetti's Warbler, as neither of us had seen then on our Fylde list (Chris hadn't seen Cetti's at all)

We started in the Fylde Bird Club as we felt this was probably our best bet. Within a couple of minutes Chris alerted me that he though he had just seen the Ring Necked Duck. I got onto the bird quickly and confirmed the ID, so sent out the news to local bird networks. It was far more active today compared to when I saw it at Thornton. With not having a compact camera with me at the time, I wasn't able to digiscope any shots so the poor photo above was with a 400mm d-SLR.

After a short time, we decided to check for the Owls and come back for the warblers later on. We checked the Bridleway for the owls looking deep within the vegetation. This caused embarrassment when a runner pointed one out just next to the path. We managed to see all 3 Long Eared Owls with relative ease.

Heading back to the Fylde Bird Club hide, we bumped into Bill Aspin, John Wright, Margaret and Mark Breaks. They had successfully twitched the RND. Back in the FBC hide, we managed to see a Water Rail casually walk across on the ice which was a year tick for both me and Chris.
Bill Aspin then rang up to tell us that they had heard a Cetti's on the other side, which we were able to catch up with with relative ease. It was quite elusive but both me and Chris were able to hear it call and briefly see it. A nice Fylde and Lancashire tick.

(we headed to Warton Marsh for high tide, but as the tide failed to flood the marsh, we left quite soon after seeing very little!)

2 comments:

Jonny Scragg said...

You missed a Short Eared Owl about 15 minutes after you left.

Mike Watson said...

Hi Zac, well done for the RnD! Some formatting tips. Highlight the text and then click 'justify' (the right hand small box of lines in the formatting palette). You can also make a 'hard return' by pressing SHIFT and RETURN at the same time, which will preserve the returns (gaps) between your text and photos. Also I recommend that you buy an excellent custom sharpening plug-in at the following website (providing you use one of the bodies their software caters for): http://www.fredmiranda.com/software/ Finally, always re-sharpen your photos after you have re-sized them for the web. This will make a difference to your photos, like having a more expensive lens. Hope this helps and good luck! Happy New Year, Mike