Lowton Bird Observatory, Day 26

Under the goat willow tree in the corner of the garden we are very fortunate to have a small colony of wild bluebells growing and they give us a lovely display every spring. At times like this when we can't get to our favorite bluebell woods, these plants are a great source of comfort. Wild bluebells have long cylindrical bells as opposed to the rounder, shorter and fatter bells of the garden escape hybrid bluebells (below).

As far as birds are concerned it's been a fairly quiet week here in Lowton, not helped by the fact that I was working on Thursday and Friday which meant that there were no records at all from those days.

We might be in lockdown but nature carries on and locally many summer visitors have arrived. Here at the obs we've already seen swallow, sand martin, house martin and swift, the latter was seen today and is my joint earliest date ever for the species. I've already reported on ospreys and common scoter passing over and locally I've also recorded various warblers namely blackcap, whitethroat, chiffchaff, willow, reed, sedge, grasshopper and Cetti's.  No yellow wagtails, cuckoos, wheatears or ring ouzel yet, but still plenty of time, and who knows, we might get a tern or two over as well.

So today we had some rain and it produced the goods in the form of 50 sand martins going over the garden all headed south for some reason. Other birds today included at least two stock doves and a new one for lockdown birding, three mistle thrush chasing each other around for five minutes.