Stones and Darts
The last 10 days has seen me become obsessed in scouring the local patches for large, open, weedy fields and scanning them for Stonechats - the reason? - we are experiencing ridiculously high numbers of these charismatic chats at the moment. Prior to this, my highest local day total for a single site was 10. And as will be shortly revealed, that day total has been smashed, several times over. The first inkling that something unusual was happening occurred on 30th September when I was skywatching from the base of the scarp slope just east of Box Hill. I was aware of three, maybe four Stonechats in front of me, but was more interested in the small number of birds passing overhead. Now and again I would take a break from looking up and scan the fence lines close by. And that was when I was confronted by a loose flock of 17 Stonechats, 10 of which I managed to capture in the image above (one of them is hidden on the bottom wire). Now this was unusual! I returned three days later to find th