The onset of a cold snap has seen some good winter birding the last few days.

Friday.
A combination of working from home, some well timed glances out of the window and a couple of days of snow to help push birds into suburbia  resulted in some great birds right on my doorstep.

The morning started well with a small party of Long-tailed Tit in our back garden being a garden tick-our garden is small and hemmed in by houses so we don't get that many species. It's a different story at the front of the house which overlooks some SUDs ponds fringed by reeds and native planting-scrub and trees. The habitat has matured now but I'm ashamed to say I don't keep an eye on it as much as I should, perhaps today's events will change that.
I glanced out the kitchen window while making tea and I noticed a finch flock land in the Alders. Went upstairs to get bins and watch from the bedroom window, a mixed flock mainly Goldfinch but also a few Lesser Redpoll and then a view of a bird that looked suspiciously pale. At that point the birds are disturbed by workmen.
I go back downstairs to get my scope and set it up (This is getting like that movie Rear Window) and relocate the flock. Almost immediately I've got good scope views of a classic Mealy (or Common, but not so common round here) Redpoll, a fem/1st winter type lacking an obvious 'poll'. The birds get disturbed and I'm thinking I should get back to work.
Things get even better later when I look for the flock again-now 2 Mealies in the flock, the second bird being a beauty of a male with a big red 'poll' and rosy pink breast. They are feeding on Alder cones with around 20 Goldfinch and a few Lesser Redpoll and Siskin. Then a Sparrowhawk flies through and flushes the finch flock, then a water rail flies from one end of the pond to the other, then a flock of 13 Waxwing fly through.
I'm on a roll so I check out the evening roost flight of gulls for a white-winger, probably too much to ask but over 1,000 Herring Gull head through on their way to the Forth. This all from the bedroom window!

A proper record shot! digiscoped through a window but note the neat streaking on white flanks and cold tones to upperparts lacking buff tones to these areas found Lesser Redpoll. These pics make this bird look almost striking enough to be an Arctic but in reality neither were quite that striking e.g. although they had white rumps these were well streaked.

Saturday..
Checked out the gulls at Angle Park. As always large numbers coming into bathe and rest from the nearby tip. But as usual it was a struggle to pick out much variety (given the recent influx, it felt ripe for a Glaucous Gull). Not even many obvious Scandinavian Herring Gulls. I did have a very interesting bird that  certainly had more than a look of 1st w Caspian about it but sods law dictated that as soon as i got on it a Buzzard decided to fly over and put everything up!
Some compensation came in the form of 2 Adult European White-fronted Geese, never a common bird in Fife.