Goldcrest

So there I was, standing on the riverside pathway in Holy Trinity churchyard in Stratford, looking like someone who was doing their socials rather than paying attention to the beautiful and historic surroundings, but actually using the Merlin app to check for birds and help me learn more of their songs and calls, when my peripheral vision caught a tiny movement in the nearest yew tree. I edged into a better position, raised the camera, and waited, and a couple of seconds later I was rewarded when this tiny face appeared. 

The second photo was taken a split second later and shows a little more of the Goldcrest's dazzling head stripe, and its open bill - which was aiming for an insect, I think, rather than calling. Certainly I didn't hear it, and probably more to the point, neither did Merlin, which almost certainly has better high-tone hearing than my elderly ears can manage. The bird then departed into the depths of the yew, but reemerged a few seconds later, in better light but higher up, so my next set of images were taken from below the bird and aren't quite as pleasing. And a few seconds later it was gone, flying across the churchyard to a different yew to resume its constant search for food.

Although a Goldcrest will trump anything else on most days of the birding year I did photograph one other bird at Holy Trinity: a Blackbird paused close to me on top of a stone cross for just a fraction of a second, and luckily the eye tracking of the R5 caught it and gave me quite a nice portrait, which I've posted to my Facebook page if you'd like to see it. Two frames later the bird was a rising blur, and three frames later the cross was empty.

The Blackbird was one of a number I saw in the churchyard today, and there were at least a couple of Song Thrushes there as well, which is interesting because I've seen virtually none over the past couple of months. They're probably resident birds that have been keeping a low profile as they moulted, and now feel safe being seen out and about again, but it's also possible that they're incoming migrants. There has been a large influx of winter thrushes into the UK recently, picked up by bird observatories and by individuals and local groups who monitor and interpret the noise of flocks of birds travelling overnight. I even saw an amazing few seconds of footage last weekend that came from Dutch rainfall radar, of a huge flock of birds leaving the Wadden Islands at dusk on 24th October and setting off across the North Sea. (I haven't been able to find this film anywhere other than Twitter, and I believe that under the current mismanagement there you won't be able to view it unless you're a registered user - but if you are, it's here.) Somewhere in the churchyard today both Merlin and I could hear at least one Redwing, but though I followed the noise right around the site, I didn't manage to see the bird. I'd been hoping to get another photo like this one, but even if I had, there's no way it would have pipped the Goldcrest to top spot today.

R: C6, D13.