With so many high winter birds present in the county - particularly a long staying GLOSSY IBIS - it was time to catch up with some of them and where better than at Minsmere, the bird watching mecca. We caught up with the IBIS, and had some great views, as well as lot of other species, both avian and mammalian. It was a day of great quality, but surprisingly low in quantity, with much smaller numbers of wintering birds than usual.
It was a beautiful day, easily the warmest of the year so far, and outside of the wind it was quite hot. It has been a strange winter of harsh frosts mixed in with warm sunny days and brief snow flurries and it seems that a lot of wintering birds have decided not to turn up, preferring to holiday on the continent.
Ipswich Station
So the plan was to meet my brother at Saxmundham train station, and that meant catching the train from Ipswich. Because I have no children I didn't know it was half term so was unprepared for finding the place heaving as parents and children waited for the trains to London. It was a lot busier than I expected for a Monday morning. I boarded the 10:17 train on platform 4B, then as the train was scheduled to go an announcement came over the intercom telling everyone to get off the train. We were then told to go to platform 3 where the same train we were on was making its way. So we ended up reboarding the train only this time on platform 3. A bit pointless really and typical of rail travel.
I got to Saxmundham, the station of a small market town, forty minutes later and ten minutes late, where I met my brother and he drove us to Minsmere.
Minsmere
Being half term the visitors centre was heaving with families, the café was packed so we had to head off without a coffee. The good things about families is they don't tend to move very far and so we found the reserve to be very quiet thereafter.
On the bird feeders, by the centre, COAL TITS and MARSH TITS were present among the commoner more garden type birds.
We went to North Hide, which as the name suggests is placed on the northern part of the scrape. The path does a circle around the scrape with a hide at every navigation point. The one thing that stood out was how quiet the scrape was. The water levels were extremely high and West Scrape was frozen over completely.
In the short grassland immediately in front of the hide LAPWINGS were starting to create territories for the breeding season, whilst a couple of SNIPE were about and there were also some CURLEW.
Although still winter some LAPWINGS were creating breeding territories in the short grass in front of North Hide
Upon leaving North Hide, there was nothing much in the scrub and reedbeds as the path made its way to the sand dunes and out to sea. Perhaps for the first time I have ever seen it the sea was very calm, like a millpond, although not many birds were present, mainly GULLS lazily flying up and down the coast. Dotted on the water were a few RED-THROATED DIVERS and GREAT CRESTED GREBES, getting tricky to see right on the edge of viewing distance - you really need a telescope when sea watching.
East Hide is accessible from the beach, and overlooks a large part of the scrape. DUCK numbers were low with all the commoner DABBLING DUCKS present in small numbers. Amongst them I counted seven PINTAIL, always rare away from their favoured wintering spot. Also present to the left of the hide was a female SMEW. Females of this species are called REDHEADS, because of there, well, red heads, they also support a white cheek. These ducks are a good wintering bird to find, with only around 200 in the country and Minsmere is probably the best site in Suffolk for finding them.
The Scrape, the distant SMEW is the duck in the left middle.
We carried along the dunes making our way to the South Levels an area of wet grassland, which with the recent wet weather was largely flooded. DUCK numbers weren't high and in amongst the birds were a few GODWITS. We saw a female STONECHAT in the gorse bushes in the dunes.
At the Sluice the path splits in two. One path takes the route around the rest of the scrape on the reserve, whilst the other was a public footpath that went to a palce called Eastbridge a little village near Minsmere. We decided to take the footpath because we had heard there was a GLOSSY IBIS residing there. The path went behind the grazing marshes, around the reedbeds, before finishing up at Easbridge. Surprisingly we saw few birds along there, just the one STONECHAT.
I shall describe the rest of our adventure in the second part.
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