Northern visitors, Pembrey Country Park Tuesday 20th November 2018

After a successful ringing session last week, I've been keeping the feeders topped up, the food is certainly disappearing fast, and spending about an hour, when I can spare it, just watching which birds are coming to the feeders.

Today was particularly busy with lots of Blue, Great and Coal Tits visiting plus a nice flock of about 45 Chaffinches, the flock was feeding on the ground around the split grain being joined by a Jay, Magpie and Carrion Crow.

A couple of Mistle Thrushes, Song Thrushes and a small flock of Redwings were on the grassy areas.

Redwings are winter visitors from Scandinavia, with occasional individuals arriving from Iceland, (these tend to be larger and more strongly coloured compared to the Scandinavian birds), and can be present in good numbers from November through to Spring.

Redwing

Whilst watching the Chaffinches feeding I picked out another finch, very similar to the Chaffinch but this one is another winter visitor to the UK it was a Brambling, in fact there were two of them in the flock but they were quite elusive, diving into cover at the approach of the Jay and Magpie. This northern finch is not particularly common in Carmarthenshire but is easily overlooked. There are good numbers of birds around the park at the moment so if you do visit and find something interesting please feel free to drop into the visitor centre (now down by the beach access for the winter) and leave a message for me.

Brambling

I haven't kept a proper bird list for the Country Park n 2018, however the bird list for the nature reserve is now at 115 species for 2018, I'll publish it in the blog soon just in case any followers of the blog have records to submit.