Compared to last years stellar birding, this year has seemed very slow at times. I guess it’s inevitable after last year’s September fall of the decade of American warblers that this year would seem dull in comparison. There’s been nothing in the past couple of weeks to temp me to do a “drop all and drive” so I’ve been concentrating on getting a few jobs done at home prior to my annual Shetland trip at the start of October. I did, however, recently spend a very enjoyable and relaxed morning at Upton Warren. My plan was to do an hour or so at the moors before moving onto the flashes. A short while after I set myself up in the hide overlooking the moors a Kingfisher flew in and perched on one of the newly installed sticks in front of the hide. It spent maybe 5 minutes jumping between the three sticks. It caught several small fish providing some lovely photographic opportunities. I hence decided to stick around to see if he came back. The male and female are similar in appearan
Wryneck Autumn migration kicked off in earnest at the weekend with good numbers of common and scarce migrants plus the odd rarity at the usual migration hotspots. I hence planned a layback days birding on Tuesday without the usual twitch pressure of trying to get a UK tick. The east coast was the obvious destination but I was torn between Norfolk and Yorkshire. In the end I went for Spurn as everything is quite spread out on slow narrow roads in Norfolk and I wanted to maximise my birding time. Continuing my grumpy old bugger theme of some recent posts, I knew that multiple road works were going to wind me up and sure enough 8 sets of major works on route added an hour to how long the drive used to take me. All but one had average speed cameras and 4 long sections, including most of a 50 mile stretch on the M1, were the result of the shambles caused by the department of transport turning 3 lane motorways into 4 lane death traps for anyone stupid enough to break down. Current moan