NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Most birders will have a place that they regularly visit, a place that will usually be fairly local to where they live, and, quite often, there may be several of them. They are fondly referred to as 'patches'. After visiting these places over a few years, the birder will become familiar with what the patch offers and will enter into a contract of benign and pleasurable birding - surprises do not come along that often, so when they do they are highly valued. This morning at Canons Farm was one big surprise. No rarity was involved, but as is so often the case when birding a patch, species that are common elsewhere can, on the site, take on a much more hallowed status. There is also the question of where birds appear on a patch. Certain species (particularly passage migrants) have a habit of turning up along the same hedgerow, in the same copse or along the same fence line. This morning's experience were of birds cropping up away from such expected sites. I arrived at t...

The weather forecast suggested a partially cloudy morning with the outside possibility of a few spots of rain. They didn't get it quite right. I was at Beddington by 05.30hrs and spent four hours largely getting wet in proper rain. The soaking of the verdant vegetation meant that my walking along the overgrown footpaths also meant a soaking of my clothing, plus the copious transfer of grass seed. Oh well... Most of the waders that had been present this past week had moved on, so that I recorded just single  Little Ringed Plover, Green Sandpiper, Common Sandpiper and Lapwing. One surprise was a juvenile Common Cuckoo that flapped through the dense vegetation on 100 Acre (image, taken in appalling light, above). There was also a juvenile Yellow-legged Gull on the Northern Lake (poorish pictures below, that show a few of the characteristic features of this species, such as inner primaries same tone as outer, the plain dark tertials edged white). There were plenty of pas...