The Juvenile Birder

Northern Success! We arrived at Druridge Country Park at around 8:30am after getting a lift from Keith & Dave. As soon as we got out of the car, we were greeting by around 120 Pink-footed Geese flying overhead, making their iconic call. I immediately began scanning the lake from the car park hoping to find my target bird. Whilst scanning, I was pleasantly surprised to find a pair of Red-breasted Mergansers on the lake, something I didn't expect to see on an inland lake, but not too special as we were still fairly close to the coast. We then walked further round the lake towards a big crowd of birders, when a lone birder headed our way and told us that the bird had flown down to the other end of the lake. We then went back on ourselves, but once at the other end of the lake, we still couldn't find the bird, only a few Goldeneyes and two Little Grebes . While we were scanning through the birds, we found out that the bird had been seen again, near where we had parked. We quic...

Day 2: You Can Never Have Too Much of a Good Thing! We set off from our Inn at 6:30am and went over to Blagdon Lake for a Ring-necked Duck. We found the lake, which was huge, but at the two different locations that we stopped we were unable to find the duck. We could not get close to the lake; it was always overlooking private land and we were unable to therefore walk the circumference of the lake. We also tried to get to the location of the Bristol Dartford Warbler at Trooper's Hill but there was a lot of road works taking place in Bristol and the old sat nav we have could not navigate us to the right location. We ended then going to WWT Slimbridge. We arrived at 9:30am and rushed straight to the Rushy Hide in hopes of seeing the Bewick's Swans. We entered the hide and the three Bewick's Swan were sat right up front, on the mud, showing very well. I had only seen Whooper Swans at WWT Martin Mere, a site local to me, and had been scanning the flocks at Martin Mere for ages...