A lovely calm afternoon at the Corse. The flock of 26 chough were back in the fields around Starman's Hall (they only seem to absent themselves during our winter farmland bird counts), and the reedbed was alive with the sounds of water rail, little grebe, moorhen, coot, mallard, teal...but no Cetti's warblers. I located a noisy flock of 200 alarmed linnets in a blackthorn thicket high on the slopes of Kilpaison Burrows - they took to the air, only for a female merlin to attack and chase one that it separated from the pack - the linnet eventually went into a steep dive and managed to escape into another thicket.
