I caught sight of a blackbird like this one on several occasions last year, but it was down in the park. It’s just begun visiting our gardens and is around most days at the moment.
The cold weather is making birdwatching from the window a lot more interesting: so far, in addition to the heron, I’ve seen a male and a female blackcap, a nuthatch, a green woodpecker, redwings, a sparrow (rare in our gardens), a juvenile peregrine (on my lawn about a metre from the house, feeding on a male blackbird), a buzzard (flying past my bedroom window at below roof height), plus all the usual birds – a robin, long-tailed tits, coal tits, great tits and blue tits, goldfiches, greenfinches, chaffinches, blackbirds, wood pigeons, collared doves, magpies and gulls. I think I caught a glimpse of a wren diving into my neighbour’s conifer hedge one cold morning and yesterday a dunnock was poking around in the exposed grass along the bottom of my south-facing fence.
On the first snowy morning there were huge flocks of thrushes passing over at 8 am – later on in the day, up in the fields, there was an almost continual stream of them. You can find up-to-date information on local bird activity at the Dawlish Warren NNR website – on Wednesday 6 January for instance they recorded over 3000 lapwings heading west to escape the worst of the weather.