Soil Hill day of the Goldfinch

Wednesday 14:30 – 16:20

With a rather large plastering job, looming on the horizon, for our house I’ll have to make the most of every opportunity to escape.

Today I had a few hours walk up to and around Soil Hill.

It was a dull, breezy cool day with the odd bit of drizzle thrown in.

Having dropped some birdseed up there earlier this morning, I was hoping that something might been enjoying it this aft. – but no dice.

On the way up there I spotted a Kestrel, 1 Common Gull, 1 LBBG and a few Swallows in the air.

On Soil Hill there was quite a bit of bird movement.

From the main track I spotted 5 Meadow Pipit, and 2 Skylark.

A flock of c12 Goldfinch were feeding on the thistles and they soon took to the skies followed by a flock of C50 Goldfinch. The first flock had at least 2 Siskin in amongst.

Lots of Goldfinch was flitting about all over the hill.

As I walked towards Pottery Cottage on Ned Hill Track there were at least 20 feeding on the ground.

A helicopter came over, not very low, but very noisy and this disturbed the birds and they all took to the sky in unison.

I estimated there to be near 500 birds, an amazing sight. Its difficult to estimate such a large flock, but one photo has c100 birds and there must have been 5 times that number of birds there (not all Goldfinch no doubt).

I don’t know if this is a record but it was certainly a record for me.

Coming off the hill I spotted another couple of Kestrel, c40 Starling, Common Gull and a Green Woodpecker.

Sue’s friend Helen told us that they had, had a Wood Warbler in her mums garden at Luddenden – I should have mention this several weeks ago , oops!

It’s Pool Night with John across the road.

We play our own version of pool.using Snooker type rules, because we don’t know (and don’t care about) the current version of the pool rules.

Goldfinch & Siskin