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| Lapwings in Tart's Field today |
My first few days back at the patch haven't been too bad. I haven't found anything that's significant beyond the CFBW recording area boundaries, but since the patch's second Common Snipe of the year on Saturday, I had an adult Great Black-backed Gull that flew over the farm yesterday and today I found two Lapwings in Tart's Field. Both are scarce birds at the patch, the gull in particular, which is a rather sporadic fly-over. It took me over a year to see my first Great Black-back there, and not for wont of looking for them, but last winter there was a handful of sightings. Lapwings still bred at the farm in the latter half of the twentieth century and wintered there in numbers, there was even a wintering flock of up to eighty birds in the winter of 2007/2008. Nowadays they're sadly a special occurrence, which says something about farms and birds and their declining relationship; they were recorded on 22 dates in 2010 and on 24 last year.
