It was a quieter day today which was to be expected for a foggy Monday morning, although 3 Firecrest in a private north Poole garden was a nice start to the day. In Middlebere a ringtail Hen Harrier passed by the NT hide and an adult male was on Hartland plus the Great White Egret was in the channel too. At Lytchett Fields the Lesser Yellowlegs was still present, another Jack Snipe was flushed, 2 Water Pipit was on the fields and a Marsh Harrier passed over. There were also good totals of comer species such as Snipe, Redshank, Dunlin, Greenshank, Lapwing and Teal. From Hamworthy Beach a small Red-breasted Merganser roost formed out in central harbour at dusk and on Brownsea 30 Spoonbill were roosting.
Finally, our night sound recording gear was out again last night in Old Town Poole and although the night was a clear night, there was still a decent passage of thrushes, again mainly Redwing, Blackbird and Song Thrush with a few Fieldfare thrown in for good measure, but due to the clear conditions call frequency and regularity was far less intense compared to Friday and Saturday night when thick, low cloud cover dominated the night sky. However, the undoubted highlight was a Firecrest that passed right over our microphone at 1:49am giving two different call types that we’d expect for Firecrest. From carrying out our night migration work for a couple of years now, we’ve been able to obtain the equivalent set of calls for night migrating Goldcrest too and can show you below the difference between the two. We’re learning so much about night migration using this monitoring technique that even in the last year we’ve unearthed some pretty incredible discoveries. You may remember back in August and September we began encountering Ortolan Buntings in many of our night recordings, well, in partnership with the Sound Approach you can now read a recently published article which discusses in detail how we came to our conclusion that Ortolan Buntings were passing over Poole during their peak migration time.
Firecrest 31/10/16 @ 01: 49 Old Town Poole – Call of a night time migrant
Goldcrest 09/10/16 @ 2:29am Calls of a night time migrant – Old Town Poole listening station
