Osterley Park NT (26 November 2024)
A very pleasant stroll around the parkland of Osterley on a gloriously sunny day. So sunny that we saw 2 Red Admiral butterflies. What I thought might take a couple of hours extended to over 4 hours for those of us who stayed for lunch in the atmospheric Old Stables café and perused the 2nd hand bookshop and NT shop. No one was in a hurry to leave! Bird-wise someone said, “We saw far more species than I thought we would!” 45 in fact if you count the Mistle Thrush heard as I was waiting for everyone to gather by Jersey Gate and the Sparrowhawk Debbie and Brenda saw as they walked back to the car park.
One highlight was the Little Owl spotted by Diana sitting on the grass next to a Sweet Chestnut tree in the Charolais cattle fields along the main drive. It was perhaps looking for earthworms but was harried back into the tree by corvids just as Debbie got her camera focused on it! The other highlight was fly pasts by a couple of Kingfishers on the Main Lake. Their iridescence flashed in the bright sunshine, but you had to be quick to spot them as they crisscrossed the lake. We stayed here a while and eventually found one perched up behind a sunlit Grey Heron.
Other birds on the lakes included a Little Grebe, a Mandarin Duck, 6 Shovelers, 6 Gadwall, 3 Great Crested Grebes, Tufted Duck, Mallard, Coot, Moorhen, Mute Swan, 17+ Cormorants drying out on the usual bare branches overhanging the main lake and plenty of Egyptian Geese. They got themselves in a real state, noisily chasing off other pairs after they all gathered around a lady with a shopping bag full of bread. I wasn’t at all happy when a cloud of Feral Pigeons flew towards us as the bread ran out! Canada Geese grazed on many of the fields and Greylags flew over. A few Stock Dove could be picked out in the cattle pasture, amongst the Woodpigeon, along with a couple of Pied Wagtail and Green Woodpeckers. One GW flew right in front of the group and kept calling as it fed in the grass while a Great Spotted Woodpecker hammered a tree on the other side of the path. As well as the Sparrowhawk our raptor total was Kestrel, a Buzzard sat hunched in distant tree and a Red Kite.
Goldcrests accompanied our whole circuit picking tiny insects out from between pine needles or from the underside of leaves on the sunny side of many evergreens. A Nuthatch was seen in their usual place on the tall old trees that line the main drive. Blackbirds were good to see after a marked absence earlier in the year and a Song Thrush called from an Elderberry clump. Jays were burying or unearthing their caches of acorns; it was hard to decide which. The rest of our 45 species was made up of Wren, Robin, Goldfinch, Ring-necked Parakeet, Magpie, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow, Black-headed Gull, flyover Herring Gull, Blue Tit, Great Tit and one of our favourite birds, Long-tailed Tits which bustled past in a flock of about 8. Despite the din of traffic from the M4 we could still hear their dog whistle and football rattle calls. An excellent walk that always feels rather Christmasy, whatever the weather! We could almost imagine carriages drawing up at the grand front entrance of the Child banking family’s party house in the countryside.
by Rebecca Dunne