A very windy walk

I must be feeling energetic because I went for my second walk to Pulfin Fen (Click here for map) in two days! It's probably about a mile to walk along the River Hull from Hull bridge in Tickton and today it was so windy I had trouble standing up straight. Fortunately the path is on a river flood defence and I was able to walk in its shelter. There were pretty much no birds at all due to the wind until reaching the lake. No Chiffchaff today and only a few Blackbirds, Redwings and a single Fieldfare.

At the lake there are enough trees to get some shelter from the wind and hold my binoculars still enough to scan the water for ducks. Pretty much the same suspects as on tuesday, with lots of Wigeon, Shoveler and Mallard. A few Pochard, Tufted Duck and about 20 Gadwall along with about 30 Coot. The two male Pintail were still present although they took off and flew north as I watched them. Possibly they'll turn up at nearby Tophill Low. There's also a female Goldeneye that seems to have made this lake its home for the winter and a small flock of 8 Great-crested Grebes.

All the wildfowl at this location seem to be very flighty, constantly taking off, flying around and relanding. I wonder if there's a problem with shooting here? It's certainly a popular pastime in this area.

One side of the lake is very sheltered by trees and an earth bank and it was surprisingly warm there, so I decided to sit down and enjoy the relative warmth. Then the sun came out! Felt like I was on a tropical beach. Well, not quite. Some quite nice cloud formations were interesting enough for me to take a couple of pictures. I'm not much of a photographer, but here's what I managed.


No matter what I seem to do my photos go wrong, but I seem to get some half decent results with my digital camera. The best thing of course is that I can delete the three dozen crap ones to leave the single good shot that I managed to get.

Whilst I was pussy-footing around with my camera a beautiful male Bullfinch flew into a nearby tree. Just about the only small passerine I saw today and a first for the location (at least for me it was).

A very windy walk back to the car and quite nice to get home only to see, on the lunchtime news, that the wind was causing havoc throughout the country.