Hastings non-rarities

 A male House Sparrow

 The same bird on the deck

 Northern Wheatear

 The same bird as above surveying the scene

A probable 1st winter Robin

Had a nice r&r weekend in Hastings. I laid down my binoculars for most of the weekend but couldn't resist a walk along the coast on Sunday. Had loads of migrants overhead heading west including Meadow Pipits, Swallows and 'alba' wagtails.

It's not always about rarity hunting.

Saddle sore in Amsterdam

I spent two lovely days in the Netherlands last Thursday and Friday at the behest of the Netherlands BirdLife International partner. Thursday was spent giving a talk about my work promoting urban birding around the world and then taking part in a seminar on getting urban kids interested in nature.

The following day I cycled for what seemed like an eternity around the city and environs led by BirdLife's urban bird specialist Jip Louwe Kooijmans and in the company of a Dutch journalist bringing up the rear. 

Saw some good birds includin a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker (a city rarity) and heard Crested and Willow Tits.

Read all about it in a forthcoming Birdwatching Magazine article.

 Lunchtime for two Carrion Crows

 Juvenile Coot

A winter plumaged Herring Gull 

 A Common Buzzard being mobbed by a Carrion Crow

 Great White Egret

 Common Frog

Distant flock of Great Cormorants

The Wanderer Returns!

 Our 1st Whinchat of the autumn

As the rest of London shuffles knee deep in delightful Whinchats, we at The Scrubs were crying into our peppermint teas lamenting at the non-appearance of our archetypal autumnal migrants. In days gone by we used to regularly host up to 20 birds on our grassland. Back then, we were the London terminus for this denizen of the wilder spots of Britain before they continued on south.

So how happy were we to have discovered one this morning!

The morning after the Nightingale before

 A migrant Sedge Warbler

 A female Four-spot Orb Weaver Spider

 A dew bathing Robin

More bathing

Yesterday, we recorded our first ever autumn migrant Nightingale at The Scrubs. It was found along the western end of the embankment. This morning I came back to the scene of the crime in the vein hope of trying to relocate the bird.

Instead, I got attacked and bitten on the arm by a Pit Bull-type dog being walked by a woman who obviously had no control over it. The dog had to be pulled off me whilst it tried to chomp at my ankle. Thank God I was wearing my hiking boots!

Bird-wise it was pretty quiet with highlight being a Sedge Warbler I found skulking in a Chats Paddock bush alongside a Chiffchaff.

But you know what they say: tomorrow is another day!

Southenders

I took a trip out to Southend, Essex on Sunday to check out the urban birding for a forthcoming piece in Birdwatching Magazine. Having not visited this famous seaside town since the devil was a boy, it was like I had never been before. I was pleasantly surprised. There were many places both in the town and surrounding areas for some decent birding.

I took a walk along Southend Pier with my host Emily Broad. As we neared the end of the pier we came across around 40 Common Terns variously fishing along side the pier or resting along the side of the structure. I was photographing a couple of the birds resting on the side rail when I happened across a couple of terns, standing between two obvious Common Terns, that didn't quite fit the identikit. They seemed slighter with shorter and thinner legs. Plumage-wise, they seemingly resembled Common Terns

moulting into winter plumage - but something was odd about them. Tern number 2 even appeared to have a orangy tip to its bill.

I put the image out on Twitter and Facebook to solicit the opinions of fellow birders. The response was strongly divided. Some people were thinking that tern number 2 was a juvenile Black Tern, a Roseate Tern and several people were convinced they were looking at a Sandwich Tern. A couple people even suggested that they were both hybrids.

Odd tern no.1

Odd tern no.2 note the spindly legs

 A closer view of no.1

 No.1 with an summer adult Common Tern check out the delicate build

 1 & 2 together. No. 2 has a slightly shorter bill and even thinner legs

 A classic Common Tern

The most likely answer is that they were both Common Terns. Why? Well, they are both adult birds moulting into their winter plumages. Arctic Terns moult in their winter quarters, so are rarely seen in that plumage in the UK. Furthermore, they would not show so much black in the wing and have darker shorter bills. Sandwich Terns are altogether larger birds with longer black legs. Roseate Terns should display longer tail streamers and longer legs. Finally, the plumage and larger size is totally wrong for Black Tern.

All that said, I still have a problem with them, particularly tern no.2. Some people have said that the legs appear shorter because the belly feathers are fluffed out. Even if that was the case, how does that explain their thin appearance?

I'm still not wholly convinced of their identity, but hey, that is the beauty of birding: nothing ever looks exactly as they do in the books!

Not like this lovely Ruddy Turnstone - a lot more straight forward.

A lovely Ruddy Turnstone

Scrubbing for migrants

A male Common Redstart is in there somewhere - honest!

I have been thrashing my local patch on a near daily basis for nearly two weeks now - and mostly for selfish reasons if the truth be known.

You see, many other London sites have recorded some amazing birds like Wanstead Flats in east London with their long staying Wryneck and just about everywhere else has had healthy showings of Wheatears, both Spotted and Pied Flycatchers plus late Swifts. Meanwhile, myself and other Scrubbers have been flogging the place looking for anything. To be fair we have found a few Common Redstarts, a couple of Garden Warblers and a couple Spotted Flycatchers but I would dearly love to find another Scrubs rarity.

It's high time. Anyone out there with the ear of the Birding Gods?

Birding for mermaids (and mermen!)

Recently, I have managed to squeeze in reading a few books in between my usual mix of birding, writing, tour leading with perhaps a bit of sleep thrown in for good measure.

Petrels, Albatrosses & Storm Petrels of North America by Steve Howell was one book that I didn't expect to get into as much as I did. This is a group of birds that I have relatively little experience of compared with the raptors or thrushes and chats. I found the book utterly fascinating. I loved the author's comparison of the world's seas with deserts, forests and other more terrestrial habitats. It never really occurred to me to think in those terms. Indeed, he went into great detail about the different oceananic weather systems and how birds reacted to them. Fascinating stuff. All this before I even started to read the species accounts.

Of course, North America is infinitely bigger than the UK and as such had a far larger array of petrels, shearwaters and albatrosses than us. Nonetheless, the species accounts were both informative and readable. The field identification sections were of particular interest as I was learning things about some of the familiar species that I had hitherto no knowledge of. I never knew, for instance, that female Sooty Shearwaters had smaller bills than the males. For a tubenose afficionado those kinds of details must be highly useful. Which brought me to my next thought: was the author a merman? How could he know so much about a group of birds that most of us only ever see swinging past some blustery headland on a cold autumnal morning.

Negatives? I wished that I lived in an area with easy access to many species of these birds. One day?