This year has been another good year for our little area of Warwick and its 2 mile radius. As a small group we managed to find 116 different species of birds in total making this our best ever year. This is another great achievement considering 90% of the species found involved no car travel and the other 10% involved car journeys of less than 3 miles.
We started the year off well with at least 8 Stonechats over-wintering at 4 different locations within the Warwick area, 1 Woodcock, 1 Brambling, 1 Jack Snipe, 1 Merlin, our returning Whooper Swan and a Russian White Fronted Goose that only stayed for 24 hours. We also had a record number of 5 Green Sandpipers at one location and our highest count of Common Snipe was a maximum of 25 birds.
Spring was quiet this year with just 2 Wheatear and 1 Common Redstart being the highlights. Summer was also quiet but the Racecourse area had its best season of breeding Skylarks for several years with a small increase in breeding pairs. Autumn, after achieving just 1 Whinchat was saved by our star bird of the year, a Hoopoe at IBM.
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| Hoopoe by Alec Cuthbertson |
Winter is always our best season for recording species and this winter has had a promising start with at least 2 Stonechats overwintering as well as a Cetti's Warbler but no sign so far of our Whooper Swan yet.
We reached our target of 100 birds within the first 100 days of 2021 which is the first time we have managed to do that, with the 100th bird being a Yellow Wagtail found by Lizzy.
The full list of species seen during the year can be found here.
