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.

Big-nosed bruisers

A few weeks ago, I noticed the peanuts hanging on my balcony were disappearing at a much faster rate than usual and it didn't take long to figure out why.

I'm sure I don't need to tell any of you this is NOT a Ring-necked Parakeet, but its larger cousin, the Alexandrine Parakeet, which also has a well-established breeding population in Brussels and a few other European cities such as Cologne.  The big give-aways are the obvious red shoulder patch and the huge, stonking bill, as well as a noticably longer tail.  It seems they followed the Ring-necked Parakeets from their comunal roost and, now they've worked out there is good stuff to be had on my balcony, word is getting around.  I regularly have eight or more sitting around in the trees waiting and, yesterday, four of them were somehow clinging simultaneously to my bag of peanuts!

The Belgian Alps?

Twitching rarities often takes you to some strange places but yesterday has got to be the most bizarre twitch I have ever done!  On 22nd January, an Alpine Accentor, only the 10th for Belgium, was unexpectedly discovered within the walls of Bouillon castle by a group doing a bat survey.  It is still there so I finally made the three-hour long journey by train and bus to Bouillon and paid my entrance fee to the castle, where I had to walk through underground tunnels, past dungeons and a torture chamber (!) to reach the inner courtyard where the bird is often seen.  There was no sign of it of course, so I continued on along winding stairways, peering out of turret windows, to the highest point of the castle.  There were two other birders present but, after half an hour, none of us had seen anything so I headed back down into the courtyard, where I suddenly heard an unfamiliar song.  I looked up and there it was, blending in perfectly with the rock wall.

It was constantly in subsong, even when it was feeding, and, at one point, came to within a couple of metres of us to feed on some breadcrumbs.  What a gorgeous little bird and a joy to watch, having only seen them a few times before in the Alps, at elevations of 2000m or more. 
We're only a few weeks into 2023 but Belgium may already have its bird of the year.

Wild goose chase

Last weekend was my annual, winter wild goose chase around Zeeland and we'd picked a beautiful day for it.  We started with 3 Lesser White-fronted Geese, which unfortunately flew off before we could get the scopes on them, but then marvelled at the sight and sound of well over 3000 Barnacle Geese.  The day ended with yet more Barnacles, but this time accompanied by around 350 Brent Geese which came in off the sea to drink.  We also paid a visit to the Brouwersdam, where the sea was like a mirror and the unusually calm weather made for fantastic viewing conditions, allowing us to connect with displaying Red-breasted Mergansers, Eiders and Goldeneyes, lots of Common Scoter, Slavonian and Black-necked Grebes, Great Northern and Red-throated Divers, plus four Long-tailed Ducks.  A Green Sandpiper and a few Spoonbill helped make it feel more like the middle of spring than the end of January, and we finished the day with 70 species on our list.

Rutland ice rink

I was back in the UK last weekend and had a beautiful but frosty day around Rutland Water.  The lagoons had all frozen over and it was funny to see groups of Redwing slipping and sliding around on the ice as they searched for food amongst the emergent reeds.  A Long-tailed Tit also dropped down onto the ice to collect some fallen bullrush seeds and a fox was trotting around the lagoons, flushing two Snipe, which would otherwise have remained hidden.  The waterbirds were all concentrated on the main reservoir and one bay in particular held a very tightly packed group of Coot, Gadwall, Tufted Duck and a few Goldeneye.

Since the water here was too deep for the Gadwalls to feed, they would wait for a Coot to come up from a dive with a beakful of weed and then snatch it off them!  I almost walked straight past this male Bullfinch quietly munching on some old brambles.

The last hide I visited had lots of Teal feeding at point-blank range plus two Red-crested Pochard, which are, or at least used to be, rare in the UK.

Fresh fudge

It's been a very wet and windy start to the year so the only birding I have done outside of Brussels so far was a return visit to the winter warbler wonderland of Ghent, where I again got to see both Hume's and Pallas's Warblers as well as hearing a Yellow-browed Warbler near the station.  My first birding of the year was giving a guided tour around my Brussels patch, which provided 42 species, starting with a Water Rail out in the open with a fish in its beak, and ending on a perched Kingfisher.  During a walk in the forest, I got to watch a lovely group of Chaffinches and Brambling bathing in a puddle but, of course, I didn't have my camera with me.  My local park has had Goldcrest, Firecrest and Blackcap, and I made a detour to see this 'new' Ferruginous Duck on the canal, where she swam so close I even managed to get this crappy record shot with my phone.  Since our long-staying bird died, this young female is the only one to be seen regularly in Brussels although she only occasionally turns up on the canal where she can usually be found hanging out with the Pochards and Tufted Ducks.