Edgbaston Reservoir.

Strange trip to Edgbaston Reservoir today. First the good, which was the highlight of the day which was spotting some Goldcrest, then the bad, the shockingly low level of the reservoir and then seeing eight Magpie kill another Magpie, I first noticed them attacking it's back end and pulling it's wings away from it's body so I went down to have a closer look and noticed it had an injured leg and they were basically eating it alive but that's nature I suppose. Getting back to the reservoir, all of the above photos were taken standing in where the water should have been (and believe me the photos don't do it justice) A very surreal experience, I thought Shustoke Reservoir was low but this was unbelievable, talking to a local, he told me that the reservoir was built by Thomas Telford in the 1820's to (and still does) feed water into Birmingham's vast canal network system, but the problem being at the moment that the waters going out of the reservoir but only a trickle of water is coming in from the other end, he told me that in just two hours the water level had dropped a couple of feet, which is amazing when you think when it's full it has a circumference of 1 3/4 miles. It was a truly memorable sight to see it the way it was, even when you'd walked all the way around it was still hard to believe. Hopefully we'll have a decent amount of rainfall soon, especially for the Moorhens, the poor things looked lost. As a matter of interest, he also told me that the buoy marked with a 'B' is to let the members of the Edgbaston Sailing Club know that it denotes a 30 foot wide by 30 foot deep crater, created by the German Luftwaffe bombers during the Second World War when they were trying to bomb an aluminum factory just down the side of the reservoir. Birds spotted were Goldcrest, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Long Tailed Tit, Robin, Great Crested Grebe, Moorhen, Mute Swan, Pied Wagtail and plenty of Herring Gull. It was also Grey Squirrel city today, they were everywhere collecting nuts. A bird count and a free history lesson, what more do you want ?