A Quick Visit to Sandwell Valley

A quick visit to Sandwell Valley on Saturday with my Birders-in-Law. To avoid paying Sandwell Council to park we drove around to the RSPB car park and started from there, I know tight aren't we!

We only had a couple of hours and spent most of that time in the hide, it's nearly always shut when we go so that was a treat! Nice friendly, if a tad noisy, people in there, so a nice time was had, especially with a couple of Snipe showing well up one of the channels;

Not much else of note, a Littrle Egret was flying around the river, but didn't come close, there were the usual Lapwings, Cormorants, Black-headed Gulls and some distant Goosander.

A nice female Tufted Duck came by;

and a Kingfisher put in an appearance over the far side of the lake;

It moved from post to post before coming right past the hide like a little missile.

It was the Autumn all-dayer in the West Midlands, for the non-birders reading this, that is when (twice a year Autumn and Spring) all the nature reserves in the West Midlands have an unofficial competition to count the most species of birds, between dawn and dusk, on their patch. I believe Sandwell Valley ended up on 88, of which we saw a meagre 24!