Hide and seek

Our Chiffchaffs arrived en masse during the night of 15-16 March, with a dozen or more at a lake in West Flanders on 16th, and the first one singing in my neighbouring park the following day.  I also saw my first Lesser Black-backed Gulls and Avocets of the year, while a quick visit to my Brussels patch had me playing hide and seek with this female Green Woodpecker.

She was feeding in a field accompanied by another bird which seemed to be her offspring from last year, and immediately flew up and landed on the opposite side of a fencepost to two walkers who were passing by, so that she was invisible to them.  I watched this from a distance but then managed to get much closer, until she spotted me and did exactly the same thing again, occasionally peering around the side to check if I was still there.  I only managed to fool her into thinking I'd gone by hiding behind a bush, upon which she promptly dropped down into the field and resumed feeding again.

This very vocal Grey Wagtail, on the other hand, was doing its best to distract me since I think I may have located its nestsite in some thick ivy.

There goes spring

My first real sign of spring this year was this flowering crocus I found in a wood near Cologne way back in the middle of February.  A visit to my Brussels patch earlier this week revealed six occupied Grey Heron nests and provided long overdue confirmation that there are now two Cetti's Warblers present.  This is something several us have suspected but not yet been able to confirm so I was pleased to finally hear a second one singing in the distance while I watched a different individual foraging.  A Black-headed Gull in summer plumage, while not a major rarity, is something we don't get to see on my patch very often and another sign that spring is just around the corner, although I couldn't locate any Chiffchaffs.  Perhaps they knew what was coming and were lingering around the Mediterranean since, this morning, I awoke to several centimetres of snow and this snow-covered female Chaffinch sitting it out next to my balcony.