A Royal Invitation.

Swindon birder Malcolm Royal had sometime ago offered to show me a part of his Wiltshire birding area just over the Oxon border that has often caught my attention, not least because of the regular ringing of this site that has thrown up high numbers of the common and not so common. Nightingale Wood is a large expanse of differing habitats including open and also close planted woodland, wet marshy areas with wader attractive scrapes and reed beds. The river Cole runs for some lenght of the site and forms the border between Ox&Wilts. It was this stretch that gave us our best bird of the day a Brambling. We saw a good variety of Finch including Bull, Chaff, Gold and good numbers of Green. Winter Thrush were represented by Redwing and Fieldfare and also noted were Greater and Green Woodpecker. Buzzard, Sparrowhawk and many of the more common species were seen and i'm so grateful to Malcolm who had come straight from work to introduce me to a really super birding site less tha a couple of miles over the Oxon border. I will be visiting again.