22nd Dec - night frost, sunny, some cloud pm, 7C, light pm

Well that's the shortest day out of the way, but plenty of winter left yet.

A quick look at the local lake this morning, fairly quite, a couple of Little Grebe, several Mallard and the Mute Swan family were present.  Currently there only a few Redwing and Fieldfare in the area, although now most of the hawthorn berries have been eaten.  

I spent the afternoon at Stanford reservoir, I was hoping the 'redhead' Smew was still present, on first looking over the main reservoir it was not seen so I moved further on.  Scanning again I could see it near a flock of Pochard after watching it for a while i walked further to get closer.  The Smew was still a reasonable distance off but I tried to get to record photos, no very good but with cropping you get it's 'jizz' and can compare its size to a Black-headed Gull and Mallard.  A very infrequent visitor to the reservoir, so a bonus to see here.

All the other expected birds were present, 12 Shoveler were nice to see and a few Goosander were around.  Nice to see were seven Little Egret, the number increasing as the water continues to drop slowly.  A couple of grey heron were hunting too.

Passerine birds seemed fewer, with only a handful of Redwing and Fieldfare, but c35 Tree Sparrows were at the feed station with Blue and great Tits.  A good number of Great Tits were searching through the thick leaf litter under the beeches with a few Chaffinch.  Several flocks of roving Tits were seen, the number of Long-tailed Tits must be in excess of 40 around the reservoir.