Bedfordshire: a bumper crop of BITTERNS and RED-CRESTED POCHARDS

A cracking days birding.

Started off with the rest of the Beds Bittern Taskforce (Neil Wright, and Robin Edwards) at Brogborough flicking sprats out to the edge of the reedbeds. During the course of the next couple of hours I saw three different BITTERNS, with Ray W and Mark Ward seeing five different birds. One of these birds seems to have no tail and is probably one of the birds seen recently on Stewartby Lake.

Also on Brogborough, as mentioned by others are:

1 Great Northern Diver
2 Red-crested Pochards
1 Scaup

Next stop was Stewartby Lake:

22+ Red-crested Pochards
1 Great Northern Diver
2 Goosanders
(Couldn't see any Pintail, but lots of duck on here today - more than I've ever seen on there in fact.)

A quick view of Rookery North from Milbrook station platform found a femalePeregrine sat on the ice (with another on the Chimneys a few minutes before.)

On to look at Chimney Corner South pit and 9 more Red-crested Pochards, but the surprise of the day was a fly over Grey Plover! There was also a fine adult Yellow-legged Gull on the ice, along with 270+ Greater Black-backed Gulls.

The end of the day was spent looking for the Stewartby lake Bitterns, and we found one in the Marston corner at dusk. This made a score of six Beds Bitterns for Mark today - amazing considering he'd never seen one in the county until today! Steve Blain/Mark Ward