counting coots

Dear reader, I'm not the most religious of record keepers when it comes to birds. For instance when I go to somewhere like the Brent Reservoir, there are a lot of Coots. Despite the title of this humble blog, I don't sit down in the hide, crack open the big optics and start counting my little black friends ignoring all else. Of course, they get a scan to make sure that there is nothing amongst them that shouldn't be there, but like many, perhaps most, it is the 'significant' birds that I'm looking for. This can be the mundane in an unfamiliar setting, or the opposite of course.

Yesterday, the mundane in a mundane setting was the interest. Behold!

A Gull doing common

The first Common Gull in Fulham of the winter. I like Common Gulls. I thought I would check my records to see when the first one appeared last year, and this one is about five days earlier than the first in 2008. Flicking through the book, I found a startling fact. Last year a Yellow Legged Gull appeared in Fulham on exactly the same day as this year. Crikey. I also noted that flying ant day was two days earlier than last year, and extrapolating this logic I'm due a Kingfisher in the next week or so. Nice.