Kinver and the invisible Yellow-browed Warbler!

Friday took us back to Kinver for one of our favourite walks and the hope of seeing the Yellow-browed Warbler. Along the canal there was plenty of evidence of the previous days Storm Doris with a large tree down across the towpath, but we did manage to negotiate our way through the branches and continue our walk.

I was surprised at how quiet it was, our last visit about 4 weeks ago, the whole walk had been teeming with birds, but not so today, perhaps as it was lunch time (ish) they had all gone for a nap!

We arrived at Whittington about 1:15 and had a good look around, but no sign of the Warbler. So we carried on as far as the bench on the Staffs/Worcs border and had a coffee. We turned back as we needed to get back to the Vine at Kinver as we wanted to avail ourselves of the carvery and this stopped at 3pm and still allow a bit of time for looking for this ***** Warbler!

So we tried again and finally.......... nothing! We then made it to the Vine by 2:45 so we were good for lunch!

What is really annoying is that on @WestMidsBirds there were two allegedly good showings of the said bird at 11:45am and 3pm!! It's a good job that we love that walk anyway and weren't just twitching! The Yellow-browed Warbler would be a lifer for us, but hey-ho, that's birding, just grin and bear it!

Having said all that we had a great time and did of course see one or two birds! With Buzzards showing well a few times along the way.+

We saw our first Grey Wagtail of the year,

and it's always great to see a Song Thrush showing off.

We had the briefest of glimpses of a Kingfisher both on the river and the canal, a Jay flew in front of us and Long-tailed Tits gave us a a little show too. This walk however failed to give us a Goldcrest, we have seen them regularly on this walk but not today.
As lent approaches the Easter Bunny was out in the sunshine feeding up,

Birding wise it wasn't bad, they were just difficult to find this time. Eighteen species seen so pretty good and a really good lunch at the Vine rounded it off nicely!