Drop everything again ( 2023 part 1) - there's an Alpine Swift at Oldbury Power station

 

The start of spring in March is an exciting and very active time for my two hobbies of birding and gardening. It sees the start of migration proper with the first wave of  early arrivals such as Wheatears and Sand Martins hitting our shores. Migration is very wind direction dependent and birds will always wait for the right winds to migrate on mass.  In the absence of favourable winds spring 2023 migration has so far been quite subdued with just small numbers of migrants in the country. 

 

On Tuesday this week a very unusual report on RBA of a flock of six or so rare Alpine Swifts, a bird I have never seen,  in Dungarvan ,Co. Waterford caught my eye. With  favourable southerly winds on Wednesday it soon became clear that the migration flood gates had opened with over one  hundred incoming Wheatears found on the Dorset coast at Portland alone. With rain forecast for the afternoon I decided to spend the morning planting out my greenhouse grown broad beans in my veg patch while always keeping an eye on bird reports. 

 

At 12:57 the very news I had been hoping for, a gettable Alpine Swift at Oldbury power station in Gloucestershire, hit RBA and it was a case of drop everything and off I go. A very nerve wracking and somewhat licence threatening 50 minutes later I arrived at the power station car park where ten or so birders were peering at the sky over the power station at the Alpine Swift.

 

The Alpine Swift is found in Africa, southern Europe, and Asia. They breed in mountains from southern Europe through to the Himalayas. Like their cousin the Common Swift the more northern birds are migratory with the southern European population wintering in southern Africa. They are larger than our Common Swift with a wingspan up to 60cm. Apart from their size, the most obvious difference to our Common Swift is a highly visible and distinctive oval white belly patch encircled by an  olive-brown breastband. Their tail is dark with a shallow fork.

 

The power station at Oldbury is an old style Magnox nuclear reactor located next to the sea which provides the necessary copious cooling water. Power stations typically generate a microclimate warmer than surrounding areas and the resulting insect population was presumably the attraction to the Swift. The promised light rain was steadily  falling and, while this made anything other than record shots problematic for photography, it did have the advantage of pushing the insects lower giving us some great views of the Swift flying low over the car park. In flight it had the typical jet like agility of a hirundine gliding effortlessly on the wind with little or no need to flap its wings. Overhead the distinctive white belly was very obvious although it was hard to get a true measure of its overall size without anything to compare it to.

 

After an hour or so the rain was steadily coming down and with the bird moving a little more distant I decided to make my way home up the motorway in an altogether much more leisurely manner than earlier.

 

And just to make a good day even better my beloved Seagulls beat our arch rivals Palace tonight to put us level on points with Liverpool and pushing hard for Europe with games in hand.

 

SEAGULLS!!!

 

 

 Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!