You look at Ewell Village, then Epsom town centre and then the ugly sprawl that begins at Cheam and think that something as fantastic as a Redstart can drop in amongst that noisy, smelly conglomeration...bloody brilliant find, mate. Priest Hill is definitely treating you kindly.
There is beauty amongst it all Seth. A mate and I visited a small Cheam park almost every day in 1983 just to see what would pass through - the results were quite surprising.
I first met Bob Hibbett in 1981. Maybe 10-years older than me, he cut quite a striking figure, being tall and upright, wearing long flowing hair and sporting a clutch of love-beads around his neck. He spoke with a slow, deep voice and in conversation made me realise that he was not like other birders - he used to hang around the pubs and clubs with professional Chelsea footballers, and had lost a digit or two from one hand due to a failed schoolboy firework experiment - it is fair to say that I found him a touch exotic. He became a mainstay of my birding world throughout much of the 1980s. Along with his young son Scotty, Steve Broyd and Stuart Holdsworth, we formed a merry band of birders who travelled across the country in his Citroen in search of the rare and the wonderful. Birds such as Little Whimbrel (Kenfig), American Bittern (Magor), Greater Yellowlegs and Caspian Tern (Minsmere), Squacco Heron (Radipole) and Varied Thrush (Nanquidno) readily spring to mind, but there were many
On Tuesday evening, at 20.05hrs, I was taking out the rubbish, when I heard a call from south-west of the house. I froze, knowing what it was at once, but scarcely believing it. I had listened to this call on Xeno-Canto many times, getting ready for such a moment but not really considering it something that I would hear over the back garden. After 15 seconds the call came again from the blackness, now directly over head. Yes, there was no mistaking it! Another 20 seconds it called a third time - now further away to the north-east... "Kwowww" A lazy drawl, part bark, part yelp. A Bittern. Nocturnal flight-call. I went back inside and played the call on Xeno Canto just to make sure that I had remembered everything correctly. I had. Bloody hell, a Bittern over suburban Banstead! And only a week after an Arctic Skua had blessed me just a mile or so away. Sometimes the birding Gods do smile on you. To some birders these two species are just small fry, mere starters to the main cou
I first met Mike Netherwood at Beddington Sewage Farm in early 1975, me being an ultra-keen and ultra-green 16-year old birder, he some 20 years my senior. Mike, together with Ken Parsley, were the remnants of a once much larger ringing group which carried out the trapping and ringing of birds across the open expanse of the sewage farm. Whenever I bumped into them, which I often did, they would both tolerate my many questions about what they had seen and trapped and listen to me waxing lyrical about my own observations. Over the coming months they showed me how they caught the birds, allowed me to witness the ringing and measuring of them and, if I were very lucky, allow me to help them out by holding mist-net poles, carrying bird bags or writing down (scribing) the data that they were collecting into notebooks. By the summer of 1976 I had joined them, proudly in possession of my trainee ringer's permit. For the next three years (until I 'defected' to Dungeness) I spent man
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