Not a bad afternoon before the rain started in. The water was rough on the lake, with coots, black-headed gulls and a few cormorants, scattered across the water. No longer any sign of surface ice.
There were plenty of gulls around and then I saw a Sparrowhawk circling over Snodland flapping quickly, then soaring, in quite tight circles, the first I have seen since the one at Milton Creek.
I walked between the Round Pond and the Key Conservation Area, but there was little there, apart from overflying gulls and noisy magpies. On one of the bramble piles there was a (just) possible redstart - but it was probably really a robin! Several blackbirds in among the brambles and long grass.
On the way out at the junction for Nevil Park there were a few Blue Tits, Great Tits, and on the way back there was a singing Songthrush, and then a Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Dendrocopos major, arrived in the large Willow, and searched some of the upper branches. I went along as far as the entrance to the treatment site, and there were a couple of birds I couldn't identify on the wires at the plant. I wondered about Meadow Pipits. There were plenty of hazel catkins on bushes by this drive and along the stream by the Key Conservation Area, together with a few young ashes with some Chalara damage.
I moved further on and there was a small crows of Black-headed Gulls, Chroicocephalus ridibundus, all ducking their heads and apparently preening on the NW end of Larkfield Lake. There were up to a dozen Tufted Duck, Aythya fuligula, on the other side of the lake.
A cormorant went over the aquatic centre at the Ocean as we returned. Going back to the Wardens Office, there was at least one singing Blue Tit in the Bluebell Wood, and several singing Great Tits in the hedges by the offices, quite close together.
