Winter Atlas: TQ71 I
9th January 2009, Friday
An old estate road, now lined with Scots Pine and Red Oak. The milestone on the left is inscribed: “55 miles from London; 2 miles from Ashburnham Place”
Thursday 8th January 2009
The Winter Atlas requires two visits: an Early one in Nov-Dec and a Late in Jan-Feb. This was the first of my Late Visits for this winter, to Ashes Wood and Beech Farm, west of Battle.
With a slight rise in temperature and sunlight hitting the treetops, the first thing I noticed was that birds were making much more noise, which made them more conspicuous and therefore easier to count. Great Tits were in song in the woods, along with one rather feeble Chaffinch, but it was in the gardens of Netherfield Hill that there was most action, with Dunnocks on rooftop song-posts, Starlings whistling from trees and wires, House Sparrows chirruping from eaves and Collared Doves displaying from conifer to conifer.
There were far more birds too, than on my earlier visit: two, three, or even four times the number of common species such as Blue & Great Tit, Robin, Blackbird and Chaffinch.
Blackbirds are numerous everywhere at the moment, and here they were generally distributed on woodland floor, field margins & gardens. Song Thrushes however were concentrated in the thick hedges of Beech Farm; I counted just one in the first hour of the survey (woodland) but 15 in the second (all at Beech Farm).
The wildlife benefits of organic farming were obvious in terms of the variety and number of other species present, including a flock of at least 13 Yellowhammers and about 65 Meadow Pipits. Meadow Pipits can be a bit hard to find inland, but in this tetrad I later came across yet another group of 20, exploiting the mud of a horse paddock.
Another bird which can be hard to find away from the coast is Lapwing, but there were 11 on pasture, mixed in with Black-headed and Common Gulls, Rooks and Jackdaws and Woodpigeons.