19th January 2020 A Trip to Rutland Water

It was Saturday and it was our now becoming annual trip to Rutland Water a Ticklers day out lol. The Ticklers were made up of Me Stuart Paddy and Ryan and today Paul Jackson joined us on our foray. We arrived at Rutland at first light and started off at the dam end as a common scoter had been seen there the day before and sure enough the female common scoter was there showing fairly well and on the way back to the car a bonus Red Kite put in an appearence which is always nice to see. Next stop on the itinerary was the fishermans car park which is a part of Rutland which is well known for Grebes. In the week there had been a Slavonian Grebe seen there so that was one of the species we wanted to see. We started to scan the vast area of water and found a couple of Black necked Grebe there was plenty of wildfowl on the water too Mallard Tufted Ducks Wigeon a plenty and after about 20 mins Ryan picked up the Slavonian Grebe and we all managed to see it which was great.

We jumped in the car and set off for Old Hall which is another part of this vast reserve as Black Necked Grebe and a Red Necked Grebe had been seen here the day before.

We set up on the bank at the side of the Old Hall and we saw a couple of Black Necked Grebe close in which Ryan got some great footage on his phone of them which was great to look back on. I started to scan out infront of us looking through the great numbers of Great Crested Grebe and other wildfowl until i let out a shout of ive got the RN Grebe everyone came over and had a look and then returned to their scopes and continued viewing after 25 mins we decided to move to the main part of the reserve so we pulled up in the car park and set off to pay.

We decided to go to lagoon 4 first so set off on the walk round to look for Smew which had been seen there well upto 5 birds had been seen there we arrived in the hide and started to scan around we picked up another Red Kite which is always nice and after a short time i picked up a female Smew over the far side of the reedbed nothing else much of interest was seen here so we decided to check out the other lagoons on the way back to the car (smew pic)

As we checked out the other lagoons on the way to the car we managed to pick up lots of other good bird 7 Scaup Cettis Warbler 4 more Smew including the drake pictured and plenty of other stuff Great White Egrets Marsh Tit Pintail we ended up on 74 Species for the day and a thoroughly enjoyable day it was too.