Today I decided to make a trip along the North Kent coast to Reculver where Shorelark had been reported for about a week or so. As I have written on previous occasions I am not much into twitching. It is not because I don’t like to see new birds or that I am not prone to becoming obsessive about listing, it is just the simple fact that I do not like to be in crowds of people, but Shorelark is a bird I enjoy seeing very much and I did not expect there to be many other birders around given that it is not very rare in UK.

My main hope was that I would be able to get close enough to get some nice photos of a species that frequently can be very confiding as well as birding in an area that would hopefully provide a few other interesting birds. On arrival I met a couple of other birders who had exactly the same idea as me and we were all to be rewarded with some nice lunchtime birding. Read more »

One thing about birding which does not sit well with me is getting up early. Although I am used to it because of leading tours, when I have free time I do not often get up very early but today was an exception as I wanted to get to the Isle of Sheppey in the early morning to give myself time to look for whichever interesting migrants that might be around.

On arrival at Leysdown I drove straight past the coastal park, planning to return later to look for migrants, and took an early morning look over the stubble fields to search for the reported Common Crane. Large groups of Greylag Geese contained some obviously smaller birds which turned out to be 14 Greater White-fronted Geese, a nice start to the day. However, for the second time in a week there was no sign of the Crane despite being told it had been seen shortly before my arrival! Well, never mind, looking for it would give me a good reason to have a good walk around to look for other interesting species. Read more »

It has been windy in the East of England for the last few days, and with easterly winds in October usually comes a good variety of migrant birds. Over the previous few days I have had some interesting sightings in various parts of Kent but I have not come across migrants in any numbers so with great hope I headed down to Dungeness Bird Observatory to see if I could find any interesting migratory species.

Despite the brisk winds making birding hard I had the happy situation where I kept finding birds all through the day, with many of them giving me a chance to photograph them. The highlights of the day turned out to be Ring Ouzel, Firecrest, Black Redstart, Osprey, Wheatear, Whinchat and some very friendly Goldcrests; take a look at some of the photographs I got of some of these really cool birds. Read more »