Small improvements

The first Yellow Wagtail of the year flycatching next to the flood

A minor uptick in proceedings compared to the past couple of weeks. The anticipated Portland weekender started nicely with Jodie's Dotterel, which had relocated to Ferrybridge overnight. The bird was quite tame, as they often are, and performed very well for the hordes of photographers lined up along the beach.

The rest of the trip, however, failed to produce much in terms of birds - seawatching was very slow, and apart from a couple of Wheatears there was little on the land either. Ringing was quiet in the clear conditions, with a few Firecrests in the nets, most of which had already been ringed in the preceding days. There were finally some new arrivals in on the last day with a little pulse of warblers through the garden - it is always a joy to see Willow Warblers in the hand.

Sunrise from the Obs garden

Female Firecrest

Willow Warbler

Other than that I managed to see the Long-tailed Duck in Portland Harbour and twitched a Ring Ouzel at Barleycrates on the way back - both birds that I've not seen for a while. The birding there seems to have been improving steadily since I left!

View over Chesil from the Verne

Back on patch the flood is now looking rather unhealthy after a spell of unseasonably warm and dry weather. Duck and gull numbers are much reduced, although the muddy margins are still pulling in waders - particularly Little Ringed Plovers and Redshanks.

3cy Yellow-legged Gull

Shelduck pair - still a daily feature on the patch, with up to six present

I suspect these will be the last Pintails until the winter

The end of the month produced a few more patch year ticks - on 27th March the first House Martins returned, whilst a lone Ringed Plover was quickly followed by five more the next day. On 28th March I also heard a singing Willow Warbler in the ditch bordering the allotments, and they've been trickling through the hedgerows in low numbers since then.

Part of a flock of five Ringed Plovers one morning

Willow Warbler song is surely one of the best sounds of spring!

Perhaps the most interesting new arrival has been this Ruff, found by Matthew on 3rd April. It was associating with a flock of 11 Redshanks and stayed a couple of days. Ruff used to be fairly regular on the meadow in both winter and spring, although I only saw one last year - so this is a good addition both to the patch and county year list.

Whilst I was watching the Ruff, the first Yellow Wagtail of the year flew in. As is almost always the case, it was a stunning male - I find that female types tend to move through slightly later. The odd White Wagtail is still around although numbers of Wagtails in general are way down on what they were 2-3 weeks ago - I assume the majority (including the Pied Wagtails) were migrants and in this weather most have just gone straight through.

Male White Wagtail in strong sunlight

Aside from these, I've had another Green Sandpiper (a heard-only flyover), a Redpoll and a few more sightings of the Siberian Chiffchaff, which is still singing and now looking pretty smart - a shame that I've not managed to get a photo of it since it's completed its moult. I assume that it'll be off to its breeding grounds soon.

The Peregrines are now being seen less frequently, with the adult pair presumably on eggs. The 2cy individual is still hunting over the flood occasionally and showed very well on 4th April, flushing all the ducks and then being mobbed by carrion crows at close range.

From this series I was finally able to get some photographs which clearly show the Darvic ring code - it reads "XSR", and was ringed on 27th May 2024 at St Alban's Cathedral, Hertfordshire. Peregrines have bred on the cathedral since 2022 - some sad news from that pair in the last few days detailed here.

On 5th April, I was surprised to find a group of Little Ringed Plovers feeding very close to the path on a few temporary puddles at the south end of the flood, providing my best ever photo opportunities for this species. Lying in the mud, I managed to get reasonably close and then used the 2x extender to fill the frame with as much of the bird as possible. I am quite pleased with my images. If I were being critical, it was a shame that I couldn't get close enough to produce a nice, smooth out-of-focus background and foreground. This is one of the few instances so far where I've been left wondering what the result would have been like with a full frame camera and fast prime. The Micro 4/3 system is generally well-suited to my style of photography (essentially getting a somewhat artistic, sharp record shot, which I can then frame by cropping massively) - and it's only when I try something like this, which is more like conventional bird photography, that I begin struggling a bit with producing the desired effect.

The only other bird to report has been another Marsh Harrier on 8th April, flying high east into the wind and clearly a migrant . Only my third patch record and a very nice-looking male. Each day on patch currently feels like a raptor movement day and I really hope to get Osprey in the next week - there have already been three seen over Farmoor, all flying east, and each time I have been left thinking that if I had been on the Meadow I would have probably intercepted them!

Barely visible to the naked eye, as are many migrant raptors in these conditions - always worth just scanning the sky with bins

Despite a bit of an improvement these are still only the most expected of migrants, in the smallest of numbers. The high-pressure system of northeasterlies we've got over us at the moment is doing no favours for birding other than the onslaught of Little Gulls at seemingly every other site nearby, and the flood is rapidly shrinking. I doubt it will last more than a couple of weeks, and with no rain predicted I reckon that's basically Port Meadow done for this season. Bar a major surprise, it's hard to shake the feeling that this has been the worst late winter/spring period I've ever had on here - definitely time for a break after the waters dry up, and maybe refocusing on a different area for a while.

Many would call this beautiful weather but I certainly don't want to be out birding in these conditions - totally bleak

Green Sandpiper and reflections

Green Sandpiper - a relatively uncommon migrant wader on Port Meadow

After my last blog post I've been reflecting a bit on my current attitude towards the patch. After a good autumn and some rather optimistic new year plans, it it's become clear that I've lost quite a bit of motivation and my visits are often ending with negative feelings towards birding. I do think there has been an unusually long time without finding anything that I deem interesting, but I was wondering why I was feeling that way when there have been some objectively good records - e.g. the Siberian Chiffchaff. Some of the feedback I've received both online and in person has prompted me to think a bit more deeply about the philosophy of patch birding and after writing down my thoughts this blog post is the result.

Out on the patch this morning it was almost breezeless and the water was very still, so there were some fantastic reflections. I spent a while photographing a Great White Egret and a Grey Heron at close range and I've used the photos to illustrate this post, which seems fitting. The highlight of the morning was a Green Sandpiper that dropped in briefly before melting away along the ditch. Not a common bird here - in fact, we failed to record any last year, so it was pleasing to find and even better decided to pose up nicely for photos.

Port Meadow is a strange "in-betweener" as far as inland patches go - not quite at the level of some of the big Midlands reservoirs, where you can almost expect to jam in on overland movements when they're happening, but it's definitely one of the best sites in the county and has a bit of a pedigree in terms of rare bird records over the years. I've yet to compile a full patch list, including historic records, but I reckon it's somewhere around the 200 mark. It's therefore difficult to treat it just like a walk around a local park (or watching the back garden), where even new records of common birds, or a bit of interesting behaviour, are often enough to generate some excitement. There is a level of expectation involved with it which is much higher than most other inland patches, and it has been watched intensively for many years.

The truth, though, is that Port Meadow is still just a muddy puddle within the Oxford ring road - it isn't a nature reserve, isn't managed specifically for birds, doesn't have hides or contain many different habitat types and, crucially, is subject to a lot of disturbance from the public. I also suspect that the presence of Farmoor just a few miles away has a negative effect - the reservoir presumably acts as a massive beacon for any flyover migrants looking for water to rest on, sucking them down and causing most of the Little Gulls, Kittiwakes, Arctic and Black Terns to miss Port Meadow entirely. It's a good patch, but I've definitely been fooled into thinking that its potential is far higher than it really is. With this mindset comes the unhealthy feeling that spending more time out birding will inevitably result in more birds being found, and that the reason why I didn't see any Little Gulls during the recent influx was simply due to not being there all the time - they MUST have occurred, right?! In reality, with a patch like this it's mostly about luck. I don't think I would feel this way about Little Gulls if I was just going around the University Parks.

There is also an element of the law of diminishing returns beginning to kick in, combined with a perception that the quality of birding at the site is decreasing. I'll use the gull roost as an example of this saturation effect. Through the the winter of 2024/2025, I've had 60 "bird-days" of Caspian Gull according to my eBird records. This metric, often used by bird observatories, is the accumulated encounters for a species, not considering whether individuals seen on subsequent days refer to the same bird. There have likely been up to fifteen different birds in the roost this winter. This is in stark contrast to when I first started birding the meadow, when we were lucky to get five bird-days, usually involving just one or two individuals. I still remember how I excited I was when I finally managed to pick out one by myself on the Meadow. It was a stunning 1cy in November - I had found a few previously in London and Kent so I knew what to look for but wasn't very confident. Now I must have seen hundreds in Oxfordshire.

Caspian Gulls have of course become much more common throughout Britain and there is also an observer effect as I've gradually improved at identifying them - particularly at long range, in poor light or as flyovers. They are now a staple of the winter roost, just like Yellow-legged Gull. The apparent devaluing of Caspian Gull as a patch bird, therefore, has implications for motivation through the winter. Instead of there being a bit of excitement when one is recorded, it has become a case of "just another Caspian Gull" or indeed it actually being a bad day when I fail to find one in the roost! This is combined with the decline in records of white-wingers - the last Iceland Gull that I found was in 2018, and I've yet to even see Glaucous Gull on the meadow. I doubt I ever will at this rate. Overall, it means that the roost offers far lower levels of satisfaction than it previously did, and it really has become of case of wondering whether it's worth getting numb fingers and eyestrain when the potential reward seems so low, despite paradoxically recording more Caspian Gulls than ever before. The "carrot" of an Iceland Gull, for example, no longer really exists in an Oxfordshire context - there just isn't a bird that has a reasonable chance of occurring a few times in a winter to spur you on. 

The counter to this, of course, is being able to appreciate that most inland patches don't get 60 bird-days of Caspian Gulls in a winter, so it's not like the fact that they've become more common has devalued them as a patch bird across the board. Port Meadow is clearly special in this regard. Still, there is only a limited amount of satisfaction to be gained from competing with other patches, e.g. in the Patchwork Challenge. I think the main motivator is usually competing against yourself - or perhaps if you're unusually antagonistic, against the other birders also working your patch...

I think that the "optimal" period in a patch birding lifetime, at least for me, lies somewhere in the middle - once you've seen most of the common species and acquired a level of familiarity and experience with the site, but before the law of diminishing returns hits and those new and exciting moments become few and far between. I'm sure that many people can just appreciate their patch for what it is but I don't think I can. Maybe I require moving around a bit to prevent my birding feeling stale and frustrating.

Anyway - I'll have a bit of a reset this weekend with a trip to Portland. Hoopoes and Blue-headed Wagtails await.