So I made it to the 6th of January before failing in my bid to keep the blog up to date this year. This was recently pointed out to me by my friend Martine so in an attempt to catch up, here is a round up for the rest of January. I have to say that overall it was a very quiet month even for the common garden birds. Of course at this time of the year the weather generally wasn't up to very much with snow on the 23rd and 28-30th. It wasn't too heavy but left a thin coating and kept the birds hiding in the bushes.
Following Christmas the Greenfinches disappeared completely as did House Sparrows until the week commencing the 20th (based on the BTO Garden Bird Watch calendar) when three appeared rising to five the following week. Starlings were a bit more consistent appearing every week peaking in the week commencing the 20th when there were 35. The other consistent species was Blackbird where a ringed female and one or two ringed males appeared every week.
It was dark when traveling to and from work so I wasn't able to stop off at Echna Loch or Echnaloch Bay to see what was about.
The highlight for me this month was on the 28th and it wasn't even on Burray. I had gone to work and left some documentation behind so I had to come back for it. On my way back home I was driving along the Old Finstown Road when as I approached the junction with the link road through to the main Kirkwall/Finstown road a smart male Stonechat popped up onto a fence post at the side of the road.
Whilst I didn't keep up to date during January as you can see there was very little to report.
