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Bank holiday with early autumn migrants, Dotterel and Red-necked Phalarope and the hunt for Dark Matter

I did less birding than usual in August, mainly because it was often too hot to stay out for long. With a few scarce early migrants beginning to arrive, however, it was time to get out again. After all, what could possibly go wrong when sharing the roads with the bank holiday hordes? My first stop was relatively close—just a 50-minute drive. As Einstein might say, it’s all relative! My destination was Kingsbury Water Park, where a very confiding Red-necked Phalarope had been present for several days. Two comparatively scarce Phalaropes—the Red-necked and Grey—can usually be added to a UK year list with some effort. The third species on the UK list is the much rarer Wilson’s Phalarope, a North American vagrant that I have also seen in Britain. The phalarope was said to favour the shoreline near the sailing club, just a five-minute walk from the car park. When I arrived, four other birders were watching this whirling dervish spin frantically in the shallows, picking insects from the surf...
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Second helpings of the beautiful Eastleach Turville Long Tailed Shrike

I went back to the beautiful Long Tailed Shrike yesterday morning and I’m so very glad I did. The first summer male has now pretty much finished its moult and is looking absolutely stunning in the lovely morning light. With its fresh set of feathers I’m guessing that it will be heading south very soon. A reminder that this is only the third UK record of this Asian vagrant, the second being the one I saw in Fife at the start of July. It’s been present for over a month now but is still attracting reasonable numbers of visitors with perhaps 20 people there. I’ve heard of one birder who has been to see it eighteen times! I won’t repeat the background information again on this beauty in this blog but will refer you to my previous two blogs here and here . In between showings we were treated to an entertaining Weasel running across the path several times, once with a vole that it had caught. It’s easy to forget how tiny these furious aggressive predators are. The countryside around the Shrik...
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Hawfinch Happiness

     I normally get my yearly fix of Hawfinches in the nearby Forest of Dean at Parkend. I usually make one or two visits early in the year to the well-known site at the cricket ground where they come down to feed under Cyprus trees. Its normally best to get there early using your car as a hide then it’s a game of patience, i.e. you normally get a couple of visits spaced over a couple of hours stay. This year I went once in January and didn’t see any at all, hopefully because I was just plain unlucky. I would say that we are at that time of year that birders call the summer doldrums, a calm period post spring and prior to migration getting going again in the autumn. Calling this summer as such would seem a total misjustice with the first Western Reef Heron and the second and third Long-tailed Shrikes already ticked off but in terms of other doable birding for me it’s been quite slow. The heat this year has made my normal summer distraction, gardening, very uncomfortable a...
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And just like buses, Britain’s third Long-Tailed Shrike lands in Gloucestershire

   My last blog, see here , told the story and background of my twitch to Scotland to see Britain’s second Long-Tailed Shrike, a record 26 years in the making since the first and only previous record on the Outer Hebrides in the year 2000.   What this hobby is absolutely guaranteed to do is surprise you!    A couple of weeks ago rumours started to circulate of a supressed record of potentially another bird in farmland on the Gloucester/Oxfordshire border. I understand it was suppressed because the farmer was away on holiday and he wanted to sort out parking etc. when he got back which doesn't seem that unreasonable.  News only leaked out after it was thought to have gone. Not to be that easily deterred, Gloucester birder Mike King put in a sterling effort to refind it and his efforts were duly rewarded when it flew over his head on a Cotswold lane near the small village of Eastleach Turnville on Sunday.   Remarkably, based on near overlapping record da...
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Britain’s second Long-tailed Shrike lands in Fife – a mega twitch for a mega bird!

      A somewhat distant record shot of Britain's second Long-tailed Shrike So here is my plan to cope with our third heat wave of the year – drive 390 miles overnight to Fife where it’s a balmy 16 degrees. Don’t worry though, there’s no such thing as global warming, the self-proclaimed orange headed genius said so!   Seriously though, what would motivate me to drop everything and do a 780 mile round trip to deepest Scotland – well a bird obviously. And I’m not obsessed really! honestly!   OK so here is a familiar story for anyone who has read my twitching blogs before. Let’s go back to 13:30 on Saturday afternoon when a Shrike on a farm just outside of Crail in Fife was reported as probably a Lesser Shrike, a nice rare bird in its own right, but possibly a Long-tailed Shrike, a bird as rare as rocking horse poo in the UK.   I was home sitting over the weekend while Carolyn was at a wedding fare with her cake business. When she got home mid-afternoon after ...
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A sea bird extravaganza at Bempton Cliffs RSPB

  Last week I decided to undertake a day trip to Bempton Cliffs RSPB in Yorkshire to see and photograph the hordes of sea birds that gather in the spring and summer to breed on the cliffs.   A long but fairly relaxed drive had me on site at 09:00. My main target for the day was to see and photograph Gannet courtship behaviour. Before heading to the cliffs I spent some time with Bemptons thriving Tree Sparrow population.   As a young boy growing up in the small Wiltshire village of Hindon Tree Sparrows were a very common site in the countryside hedges. Sadly, our wonton disregard for our environment and the other creatures that inhabit it has hit the Tree Sparrow very hard such that they are now a comparatively scarce bird in the UK with a scattered population at a number of hotspots. Stirling work by the RSPB at Bempton, however, has helped the Tree Sparrows thrive there, so much so that  a volunteer told me that they had now ringed more than 400  youn...
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Drop everything and twitch for a UK first!! – a Western Reef Heron in Gwynedd on the Northwest Welsh coast

  A few days ago I was bemoaning the lack of good rare birds this spring to my good birding mate Nick . Notwithstanding the Cornish Lesser Kestrel at the start of May, nothing has troubled my UK list or made me jump out of the window and into my car.   Well, of course, if you are a UK birder you will certainly know what happened mid-morning on Saturday. A Western Reef Heron, sometimes called a Western Reef Egret, was found at a place called Foryd Bay on the Welsh coast. Just to add to the excitement it was, arguably, the more attractive dark morph.    This was going to be a major twitch for what was immediately a very strong candidate for UK bird of the year.   The Western Reef-Heron is common across coastal Africa and parts of southwest Asia and is an increasing vagrant to southern Europe. It has hence been “on the cards” as a potential UK vagrant for some time.   All other plans for Saturday were immediately banished.  My poor long suffering wif...
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