My second belated post in two days…I hope you like it!
26/04/09 - Keyhaven
On the 26th April we went to Keyhaven and Pennington marshes, before returning home via Calshot. We set out early for what was forecasted to be a good sea watch from Hurst spit. Unfortunately it was a lovely sunny morning and we weren’t too hopeful with the sea in the morning.
It started off very slowly, with a handful of Gannets out over the horizon, but little else moving around out on the sea so Dan and I took a break for photographing the Little Terns nearby:
Returning to the scope for a second go watching the sea, we were pleasantly surprised to get distant views of both Arctic Skua and Pomarine Skua (a lifer for me!) It was exciting to have five Whimbrel come in off the sea, just as we were leaving for the marshes…a year tick for all of us.
Photograph by Robbie.
Robbie has actually provided a map of the route we took (although this is nearly completely useless. But if you do frequent Keyhaven and that area you may have a good idea of where we walked!):
It wasn’t long before we were surrounded by Whitethroats and the occasional Reed/Sedge Warbler on the main route around the marshes. And then my second lifer of the day - Lesser Whitethroat. I have included a record shot below, unfortunately it was a lot more skittish than the Whitethroats.
Lesser Whitethroat:
Whitethroat:
We were also very lucky to stumble upon our first Adder of the year:
The Common Terns were performing well for the camera, so I have included a couple of ‘interesting’ action shots below:
Little Tern sat on the gravel:
As we continued round our planned route, we picked up a good number of year ticks, including Bar Tailed Godwits and Little Ringed Plover before grabbing a bite to eat (pork pies) and heading on to Calshot for our target bird: Nightingale.
We were lucky to get an excellent (but brief) view of this very charismatic and well-hidden bird - a great finish to the day, taking our total species count up to 88.
29/04/09 - Collared Flycatcher - Portland, Dorset
Earlier today we noticed on Birdguides that the Collared Flycatcher had moved from the private garden (the first sighting location) to somewhere ‘twitch-able’ - great news!
After finishing our morning lectures, we got ready and hit the road for Portland to potentially get our second ‘mega rare’ bird of the month (in addition to White Throated Sparrow in Hampshire).
“They don’t call it the centre of the universe for nothin” we were told, and as per usual Portland delivered:
Second image courtesy of Daniel Trim - Check out his blog, he had a much better angle…
It is hard to show just how stunning this bird really is, but the perfect contrast of the black and white feathers, combined with that classic flycatching behaviour, made this a bird that won’t be forgotten! And unlike the twitch in Hampshire for the White Throated Sparrow, it was a much calmer and friendlier crowd:
So what next?
With exams on the horizon, birding may slow down a bit but I am going to make an effort to get some new photos and trips up on here as and when I can. We are planning a day trip to Portland in the first week of may, so watch this space!
Thanks for reading, comments are appreciated.
Sam.
Tags: Bird, Birding, Birdwatching, Collared Flycatcher, Twitch
An absoulutley epic day that landed around 86 species for the team. Good to see the Gannet-Terns were behaving for us. Bird-aside the best part of the twitch had to be Dan’s face when he noticed a large, boiled, dry, camels testicle (egg) hidden amongst a nest of carrot-wire in his box-o-salad. Classic!
Great few days!