I went to both of these places with my grandad as per usual. We went to Upton warren on 29/10/13 and we saw quite a lot of birds including a first for me, but I'll get onto that in a moment. When we got there it was just our luck that the work party was there, but fortunately it looked like they were just finishing. Anyway we went round to the lapwing hide on the far side of the pool and it was empty apart from one person, so it was nice and peaceful, we asked him if their was anything different there and he said that there was the jack snipe which after being there three times when it has been there I still haven't seen it. But I wasn't too bothered, we started off by seeing a group of snipe flying around in a group of 6 or 7 and they came to land on the middle island by the paving slabs. We got quite a good view of them along with a grey heron that flew up as they went past it. We saw the usual coot, mallard etc and what surprised me was the amount of shovelers there, I mean there must have been about 50/60 males and females which is more than I have ever seen at once. There was also a group of about 10 pochard near the hide where all the photographers normally are. Just after this I looked down just below the hide and I saw a bird moving and I thought it looked like a moorhen sized bird, so I told the other bloke in there and just as it flew into the reeds he said that it was a water rail which is a new bird for me, I must admit I was a bit disappointed that I only saw it for a few seconds but I decided I would wait and see if it would come out again. Now I must have waited for about half an hour for it to come back out and I was seeing quite a few birds during this time and low and behold I looked down and I saw it fly out of the reeds and behind a small bush on the shoreline, I had hoped to get a photo of it at this point but my lens was too heavy to swing around and keep up with it, so in an attempt to get at least a poor shot of it I changed to my smaller zoom lens which is a lot lighter and at this point the water rail had gone into a different bush and could either fly off or come back towards us. Fortunately it came towards us, but again it went into a bush. As I saw it fly out of that bush about a minute later I took some snapshots of it which I shall post at the end of this. We stayed their for a while longer and a few more people came in and it became noisier than before. This made me and my grandad decide to head over to the other side of the pool to the photographer hide. When we got there it only had two people in it, which was good again because it was peaceful. The one man told us about how a kingfisher had landed on a branch about 3m away and another man that was in there with a massive lens swung it round just as this man focused and the bird flew away because of the swinging lens. This made me realise even more of the importance of keeping your lens inside the hide. I showed him the photo I took of the water rail and he complimented me on it which I was happy about. After being in there for about 20 mins and seeing some tits and reed buntings on the feeders we decided to move onto the two floored hide. As we always do we went into the bottom floor to see if there was anything interesting and we could hear everybody upstairs laughing an chatting so we decided to stay down the bottom for once. This was a good call because moments later a female reed bunting landed on one of the feeders and I have wanted to get a picture of one ever since I took some horrible ones at Middleton lakes a while before. To top this off, there was a branch next to the feeders and on this branch suddenly there was a flash of blue and this kingfisher landed on it. At this time I was eating a bag of crisps and my camera strap was underneath my bird book so I thought as I pulled it out it would have scared it off but no it stayed there, this made me very happy because I wanted to get a decent up close photo of a kingfisher before the year was out and I took a few that were blurry but then it flew off from the branch and landed on a post literally 2m away from me and my grandad where unfortunately it didn't turn it's head when I was trying to photograph it but I have some extremely good shots of a kingfishers back so if you ever need them give me a shout. After it had flown off a dragonfly landed less than a metre away underneath the hide window and I took some of the best shots I have ever taken of anything at that time. We ended the day there after popping back to the other side to have a quick look because someone said the jack snipe had returned but they were no longer there. Although I would have liked to we didn't go up to the flashes because it was getting late and apparently there was nothing up there (which I doubted because I class even a blue tit a nice spot let alone if there was some curlew or sandpiper there) but we went home anyway. At the end of this day this is what I had seen:
Cormorant
Magpie
Blue tit
Mallard
Grey heron
Snipe
Grey lag goose
Shoveler
Lapwing
Water rail!!!!!!!!!
Pochard
Teal
Moorhen
Coot
Bhg
Herring gull
Tufted duck
Great crested grebe
Starling
Wood pigeon
Great tit
Greenfinch
Dunnock
Kingfisher
Chaffinch male
Reed bunting fem and male
Long tailed tit
Buzzard
