The area of the River Gipping I look at stretches from Needham Market in the north down and through Ipswich in the south to end in the Orwell. The stretch I visited today were two groupings of gravel pits which lay on the river and are separated by several miles.
One area is Pipp's Ford and the other area a pair of pits called Stanford Mere and Causeway Lake.
Pipp's Ford
I haven't visited this area since August, and since then they have reprofiled the 'finished' pit adding in what looks like wet grassland, which will hopefully attract more nesting lapwing. However this area was fairly empty. On the pit they're still excavating there were good numbers of wildfowl, mainly GADWALL with around 50 present. There were also 7 SHOVELLER, 1 SHELDUCK and 1 SWAN there. A wintering GREEN SANDPIPER was flushed from there as I walked around.
Not much on the smaller lakes, with a pair of SWANS and a very showy KINGFISHER on River Farm Pit and nothing on Pippin's Lake.
Stanford Mere and Causeway Lake
These two fishing pits lie a couple of miles south of Pipp's Ford, and sometimes I ignore them because they're not very good for birds. Causeway Lake is often very busy with fisherman but it seemed to be out of season today with no one about. Still there was very little birdlife here with just 5 SWANS and 2 GADWALL.
Stanford Mere is usually better, but apart from about 50 GEESE there was only 2 SWANS and 2 LITTLE GREBES.
So the joys of local patch watching. Sometimes you pick up a tricky bird to find or sometimes you don't find any birds at all. I'm still awaiting a repeat of the GLOSSY IBIS I saw at Pipp's Ford last July. Now that was a good find.
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