Got Wood

Singing wood warbler, Stodday

As a few migrants continue to trickle through, we birdwatchers always hope to find something that little more unusual among the commoner species. That can mean something unusual in a real sense or simply in the context of the patch.
My best finds of late have included nothing more than the expected but always welcome whimbrel, lesser whitethroat, common whitethroat and the like.
However, Dan H came up trumps on Saturday morning when he came across a fine wood warbler at Stodday Effluent Treatment Works. This not-so-glamorous sounding spot has a habit of turning up decent birds from time to time and it's only down to the efforts of a handful of local birders that they get recorded. Over the years it has hosted such birds as yellow-browed warbler and black redstart and it has a fair track record for attracting yellow wagtail - an increasingly difficult bird to find in North Lancs.
Dan's wood warbler was singing intermittently and he managed to get a couple of record shots, one of which is reproduced here.
Unlike most other long-range migrants, wood warblers hardly ever turn up at well-watched coastal bird observatories so finding one off-passage is always a thrill for local patch birders. Also, these dazzling migrant warblers have, like yellow wagtail, become very scarce in parts of the UK where they were once relatively common and it's a number of years since one was seen around the Aldcliffe area.
Jon