Churchyard birding

I had to go to Stratford this morning for ingredients to make a batch of ragu, and I took the opportunity to do a little birding - first at the new local nature reserve off the Warwick Road, and then in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church. The Warwick Road reserve, which I'd never visited before, looks to be quite promising: the District Council has made some shallow ponds between the main road and the river, and these were busy with birds today, including a Little Grebe and a Kingfisher. Unfortunately the sightlines aren't what they might be because of an overgrowth of reeds, and I think it would be helpful if they put in a couple of blinds at the points where you can walk fairly close to the water, so as to minimise disturbance to the birds, but it was lovely to see and hear so much activity there. As ever at places like this there was a lot of dog activity, and I passed several wet and overexcited spaniels, so a rule about dogs being kept on leads and away from the water would also be helpful.

Holy Trinity churchyard (where there is a rule about dogs being kept on leads, which a significant minority of people ignore) provided me with an entirely new experience, which was watching this Nuthatch climbing around the gravestones, digging either seeds or insects out of the mossy crevices. I was a long way back from this scene, which is why I'm not entirely sure what food the bird was finding, but I was charmed to see these old stones becoming a wildlife resource. A little later I spotted another Nuthatch - or possibly the same one - searching the trunk of a pine tree for a hiding place to cache a nut it had found, and I've put a quartet of photos of this incident on my Facebook page, if you'd care to see them.