Black-Throated Thrush - Tophill Low, Yorkshire

2024 begins and what better way to spend the first day of the year than birding in the sunshine! As I'm considering attempting a 300-year in 2024 I decided to take a risk and wait until Jan 1st to try for the Black-Throated Thrush at Tophill Low. Carl and I arrived at Tophill Low at 10am after a quick detour to a flooded Duffield Carrs!

As it turns out, this was a great idea, with the Black-Throated Thrush showing well in a patch of hawthorns after only a ten-minute wait! Tophill Low was rammed with waterfowl, particularly the D-reservoir with lots of Shoveler, Gadwall, Teal, Goldeneye, Pochard and Tufted Duck. The highlight though was a group of four Red-Crested Pochard, surprisingly my first of this species!

The Black-Throated Thrush showed well, although I was at the back of the crowd!

There were two pairs of Red-Crested Pochard amongst hundreds of ducks!

We then moved on to Swine Moor, an area of flooded pasture, where we probably spotted the Lesser Yellowlegs, but being distant and in strong wind the waders were extremely difficult to identify! There were plenty of Redshank and Dunlin, and a few Curlew stood out at a distance too. A surprise Water Rail was the highlight here, along a flooded channel, with a close view of Kingfisher too.

Our final destinations were the two Ings near Leeds. A brief stop at Fairburn Ings yielded a Cattle Egret (amazingly a bird I failed to catch up with in 2023) in a flooded cow field with two Little Egrets. Then, at St Aidan's/Swillington Ings, the long-staying Glossy Ibis showed exceptionally well down to a few metres! Other highlights here included large numbers of ducks, including five Goosander, a hunting Marsh Harrier and a Little Owl towards dusk in the usual place.

A distant Cattle Egret was my first for over a year!
My best-ever views of Glossy Ibis

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