New Forest Holiday Day 4 : Ashley Walk : 29th June 2011
New Forest Holiday Day 4 : Ashley Walk : 29th June 2011
It was our last day in the New Forest so we decided to go for one last long walk over the heath. We settled on Ashley Walk / Pitts Wood. It was a hot day again and we did not really want to get too exhausted in the morning heat because we had to drive to Bristol in the afternoon. We could easily have stayed in the New Forest for another few days because we had far from exhausted our list of birding locations but our plans were otherwise so we settled on this for our last walk. We parked at the parking area on the B3078 named Ashley Walk and we made the long walk downhill into the heathland valley
Again Stonechats seemed to be by far the most common bird visible and we saw quite a few of these. We also saw Woodlarks again and a Siskin. We searched long and hard for the elusive Dartford Warbler and eventually we believe that we saw a female show itself briefly on a gorse bush. Irritatingly it wasn’t that clear profile of a male that gives you full confidence to pronounce that you have definitely seen a Dartford Warbler. Instead it looked like the much more drab female. The general shape of the bird and the spotted breast did not remind us of any other bird we had seen or was likely in the area so we concluded that there was a 90% chance that we had at last seen the bird that had eluded us the last few days.
As we reached the Pine Wood Inclosure we started to encounter more woodland birds such as Thrushes, Blackbirds, Long-Tailed Tit, Great Tit, Chaffinch and – eventually – a great view of a Redstart sitting on a log in the sunshine of a wooded glade. We passed just through the edge of the woods but the path ahead up to Hampton Ridge looked like a fair climb and we had already been walking for a couple of hours and we figured that if we were to do the full walk up to there and then back it was likely to have taken us 5 hours and as we still had to get to Slimbridge that day we reluctantly returned the way we came – still looking for the elusive Dartford Warbler. We concluded that we really should try again earlier in the year when we were more likely to see displaying males.
Bird List
| Species | Count |
|---|---|
| Blackbird | 2 |
| Carrion Crow | 4 |
| Chaffinch | 1 |
| Dartford Warbler | 1 |
| Great Tit | 1 |
| Long-tailed Tit | 2 |
| Redstart | 1 |
| Rook | 10 |
| Siskin | 1 |
| Song Thrush | 2 |
| Stonechat | 6 |
| Woodlark | 4 |
| Woodpigeon | 2 |