March PWC roundup

With other commitments from Saturday till Monday, I shan't be going to Eyebrook again this month (unless someone else finds something mega there today or tomorrow!), so that's March done for me, and on the whole I shall be glad to see the back of it, to be honest. Seven visits totalling nearly 27 hours for a measly six new birds for the year, bringing the total to 96 species and 107 points.

But at least a couple of the birds were unexpected: a pair of Egyptian Geese (woohoo!) on the 9th, and a Nuthatch on the 21st. The latter appears to be the first record for the site for several years, and to show just how scarce Nuthatches are around Eyebrook, here's the BirdTrack map for the species. The red flag in the middle is my record for this month, and there are no others in about a 5 mile radius. Which is odd really, as there is plenty of suitable woodland in the area. No doubt it's largely down to under-recording, but there's a definite Nuthatch 'hole' here!

Apart from these, the only other bird of any real interest during the month was a nice summer adult Med Gull which flew over me at the Stoke Dry car park on the 18th. The other three new species were Oystercatcher, Redshank and Sand Martin, of which there were just two on the 21st, in contrast to the hundreds at Rutland Water.

So that's it for the winter; from next week the list should start to rise dramatically as the migrants start to arrive...