Autumn birding in The Vyne, Basingstoke, England

Last Friday I had a couple of hours in the morning to head out to The Vyne Estate (near Basingstoke and Sherborne St John, just Southwest of London) to see what birds we could pick up in the late Autumn. The woodland paths were beautiful. Calm. With a golden carpet of beech leaves on the floor. Very few birds were about in the forest but the little pond had me cursing not having brought my digiscoping equipment with (to be completely honest it was just because I was too lazy to unpack it all out of my travel bags - poor excuse for a birder visiting a new area, I know).

On the pond, we found a good number of Greylag Goose (Anser anser, Graugans), a single Canada Goose (Branta canadensis, Kanadagans), at least five Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata, Löffelente), Eurasian Wigeon (Anas penelope, Pfeifente), Common Teal (Anas crecca, Krickente) and one Common Snipe (Gallinago gallinago, Bekassine). A few Grey Herons (Ardea cinerea, Graureiher) and Moorhens (Gallinura chloropus, Teichralle) were mucking about in the shallows and a flock of Eurasian Jackdaws kept on circling overhead (Corvus monedula, Dohle).



As mentioned before, somebody decided not to bring the pretty swaro digiscoping setup with me to the forest so photos were not really on the card. That, and the weather was grey, cold and rather unpleasant anyway. As it was, I did manage to get a couple of digibinned photos, including a couple of the Canada Goose taken through my Swaro ELs with the Snapshot adapter. The photos might not be anything to write home about, but they were good enough for a few ID shots, and they certainly would never have been possible without a great set of binoculars. Gotta love that little snapshot adapter too.


It was great to see some different birds from those we normally have here in Tirol, and it was also fun to hang out with some old friends, but I must say that however lovely the landscape, it has very little on the stunning breath-taking beauty of the Tirolean Alps.

(but I may be more than a little biased ;-)

Happy birding (especially if you are in England and have to put up with all that grey weather)
Dale