Peter Jones Wildlife blog

Sunday was sunny and well below freezing, nice Winter weather. A few Med Gulls on the shore at Lepe, and fortunately I picked up two species that had been seen on-and-off recently: An Avocet at Stansore, and a Goshawk overhead. Other additions for the year were Moorhen(!), Reed Bunting(!!), Jay (!!!), and Little Egret(!!!!). An extreme example why trying to see a maximum number of species in a day is always flawed with some common species just going AWOL. I'm pretty sure Lepe has a 100 species day possible, with spring migrants, and a lot of luck! for now I'm on 86 species, which is good for my standards in January. Photos with the P1000 are still coming along nicely. The digital zoom gets results, unlike the P900. There has definitely been a fix there! The Kestrel was a distant dot, and the still captured from video at 3000mm, plus 2.4 digital zoom on top of that! The Stonechat was much closer, and handheld.   

A video testing the extreme range of the p1000. 

Just getting a feel for how things look on a big screen

Sunday morning had the best of the weekend weather, so I headed to Lepe in search of a few common winter species still missing from my challenge. Turned out ok with Marsh Harrier and Gadwall present, plus Egyptian Goose which wasn't really on my radar, but not unusual anywhere these days. In other news, I traded my p900 in for a P1000. Had considered this a while back but was kind of forced into it as the p900 seems to make labouring noises during zooming, and is presumably unsupported nowadays. The P1000 has familiar features, but is a much better camera. I was pleasantly surprised in that the digital zoom is usable right to the maximum extreme, on a tripod. The Egyptian Goose below was in the digital zoom range, although looks to be struggling when viewed at full size.

After a couple of enjoyable mornings at Lepe towards the end of the year which included Spoonbill, Red-breasted Merganser, Firecrest, Merlin, and Great Northern Diver, I decided to buy an annual car park ticket, and spend a bit more time there in 2023. It is a location that I visited regularly a few years ago, and recall seeing Slavonian Grebe, Black Brant, Turtle Dove, Nightingale and bizarely, an escaped Turkey Vulture soaring overhead! Others have had good success here with Caspian Tern, and  Rose Coloured Starling over the years. This coincided nicely with Patchwork Challenge, a competition between birders to encourage low carbon, local birding, as opposed to travelling the country. So, I have drawn up a 3km square including the coast between Beaulieu Estuary and the private stretch of SSSI beach between Lepe and Calshot, the Blackwater flooded fields, and some farmland and woodland inland of Lepe. My first day of 2023 went well..  https://ebird.org/checklist/S125189275 Highlight b