Passage in St Helens

A week of dull murky weather with light winds was not conducive to great photographs and I'm not going to even attempt to brighten them up because this what the conditions were like! 

I spent two hours from dawn on each of three mornings at the beacon on Billinge Hill counting birds as they passed over. Tuesday was the best day with good numbers of redwings and fieldfares mainly heading south / south west, plus a single ring ouzel. The three two hour stints produced in total redwing 2132, fieldfare 84,  ring ouzel 1, skylark 163, meadow pipit 48, chaffinch 153, woodpigeon 1826, pink-footed goose 253. Other birds seen around the beacon included stonechat 6, reed bunting 26, linnet 300+, goldfinch 100+, yellowhammer 10, coal tit 6, song thrush 16.

As far as I know stonechats don't breed in St Helens and actually these birds were the first that I have ever seen on Billinge Hill so they're either on passage or newly arrived winter visitors, but it's hard to be sure with birds like this and even harder with chaffinches etc. Are they just local birds flocking together for the winter or birds from further afield? I'm not sure, but there's definitely been a build up of chaffinches recently.

Pink-footed geese are the most obvious birds on the move at the moment and most are heading east or south east towards Norfolk. Another 930 were heading east over Barrow Lane, Newton-le-Willows this morning, in 10 flocks. 

Redwings having a breather on Billinge Hill.

More pink-footed geese over Barrow Lane. It's actually been really good here recently, with green sandpiper on one of the pools, two whooper swans went south west on Tuesday morning, up to 200 skylarks on a recently ploughed field and up to 33 adult great black-backed gulls. Great black-backs are a very scarce bird in St Helens these days, but I guess Barrow Lane benefits from relative close proximity to Pennington Flash, where up to 150 regularly roost over winter.