A watching brief

The sun was able to shine a lot today as the wind quickly blew any big clouds away. I decided I must get some air and some exercise so late this morning I set off to look for dippers and kingfishers down on our local river.

All that is left of Capel's Mill are some old stones walls where the river flows over the remains of the mill race. I don't know when it was built or when it was removed, but the high railway viaduct was built in the 1840s straddling the river and the then newly built canal. The river flows strongly at this time of the year with all the rain flowing out of the many springs feeding the various local streams which in turn join together to become the River Frome.

Fromebanks is the narrow and high banked section of the river where it runs down towards the town centre. It is a nature reserve and recently has been improved by its new owners, Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. I hadn't been there for some months and was impressed with their improvements to the area, with maintained footpaths and clearance of excessive vegetation which hampers the variety of wildlife.

But I fear that the work may have driven off my subjects for the day, if only for a while. Normally I would expect to see at least one pair of white throated dippers and often a kingfisher which usually nests close to Capel's Mill. But it was very quiet and I saw neither of them. However I did see a lot of other birds further down the Fromebanks valley and enjoyed just ambling and then standing watching them beneath the high canopy of beech trees on the south side and a rather mixed woodland and scrub on the town side.

I spotted lots of blackbirds, bluetits, robins, magpies and a couple of wrens and a single nuthatch. I think I even saw a treecreeper quite close to a great spotted woodpecker, both of them shinning up and down tree trunks.
I started back the way I'd come and as I was always looking for elusive dippers which might be flying over the water I turned around to where I had been standing. I don't know why I did so a t that moment but this buzzard appeared at the top of the tree which I had just been standing beside.

I manage a couple of pictures before it flew away, which was quite tricky for it with the multitude of small branches to negotiate. It flew around in a large circle and then soared just above the river for a few seconds before heading away out of sight.

There was a recent local newspaper report of a pair of otters photographed swimming up the river not far from Fromebanks. Maybe might next quest should be to see them too, but I sense that might be a lot harder to achieve, probably involving late nights and early mornings which certainly doesn't appeal to me at this time of year. At least I enjoyed the fresh air and brighter sky today.