The Vintage Birder

An evening walk to the Common and up past St James Church, Shaftesbury. I walked through the grave yard to the back of the Church and noticed this sweet little door, which I presume is  an old entrance for the vicar to meet his or her congregation. Don't look like it's been used for a while.

Wednesday 26th July 2023 & Friday 28th July 2023. On my recent trips to Blashford Lakes over the past week I’ve done well with birds, I have two new species to add to my year list and some wonderful sightings of the more common species. The two new additions are Green Sandpiper seen from the Tern hide flying out of sight towards the Goosander Hide, and Ruddy Shelduck on Ibsley. Ruddy Shelduck.  Green Sandpiper - (A.W. Seaby). There have been large congregations of Coot in certain areas of Ibsley Water and so to Great-crested Grebe, where the groups of Coot are seen there is always other birds waiting to pick up titbits as the Coots resurface with weed. Other birds seen from the Woodland Hide. Juvenile Greenfinch with the adults, Blue Tit, Great Tit,  Goldfinch, Dunnock, Collared Dove and a very obliging  juvenile Great spotted Woodpecker. The Stock dove was a pleasant surprise with three turning up on one of the seed feeders. Apart from that there wasn’t much else to...

A trip to the antique quarter at Bridport, and inevitably purchases would be made, this Elastoplast Airstrip plasters tin with compartments, ideal for plugs, spoons, and lures.  I had been pondering the thought of buying a Shooting Stick for me to use on my walks, and for sitting to view from the hill looking across to Duncliffe Woods. Yet another pair of binoculars off ebay, this time a pair of Carl Zeiss Jena Notarem 8x32b MC which are in very good condition, one of the first roof prism binoculars ever manufactured from the late 1970's early 80's onwards up until 1990.  I had seen a fellow angler using one of these tins for the same purpose. Game changing binoculars for their era. The case was in superb condition. Light and comfortable to pew on. A car boot purchase a while back, I picked up this innocent painting of these Blue Tits by Tom Jones (not the Welsh singing phenomenon!) . I thought it was so sweet I had to have it.

Sunday 13th July 2023. Malc and I had planned to fish a few weeks ago, fortunately Malc organised us a spot of fishing at Riverfalls. I agreed to meet Malc there for 9:00am, fortunately we had good weather and the river looked good.  I began by using a float fished fly spoon to see if I could entice any perch, this did not happen straight away, so I resorted to using spinning rod, casting from the salmon ladder, the flow seemed a little to pacey so I tried other spots, going back to using float fishing with the fly spoon again with three maggots attached. Eventuality I did managed to catch a few Perch, four with the last Perch around 12oz. River Perch are a far better colour compared to stillwater Perch.  There getting bigger. This was the the larger of the Perch.  After lunch we adopted different areas and methods, I fished the Hatch pool with the float rod and Malc fishing the Mill Pool with the leger.  I proceeded on using the float catching Roach, Dace and Chub, ...