NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Some of you with a good memory may remember that last year I began a series of posts looking back at my earliest birding experiences. I got up to the late summer of 1976.  Part 13: August – September 1976 I had returned from a fortnight’s birding in Suffolk with enough ornithological memories to last an age, but all they did was to make me want to create more of them – and that meant more time birding! The day after unpacking my rucksack and filling my parents washing machine with dirty clothing, I was being picked up by Dave Eland to visit Pagham Harbour, in the company of Mike Netherwood and Nick Gardner. On the journey to the coast I bored them rigid with my tales from Suffolk, which they kindly listened to and made all the right noises in all the right places. There were plenty of migrants on the Sussex coast that day, even though the hot, sunny and calm weather of the past few weeks had continued. The churchyard at Church Norton was brimming with Spotted Flycatchers...

Dungeness August 1978 Regulars from Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory have arrived with their cannon net. They are going to set it up on ‘our’ beach in the hope of catching terns and Kittiwakes for ringing. My competitive hackles have risen as Sandwich Bay is seen as the opposition - the other bird observatory in Kent. It’s a local derby, this meeting of the birding clans. We, of course, claim to find more rare birds and get better falls than they do. Mind you, they’d say the same about themselves. This little get-together has been organised by the wardens, a quid-pro-quo arrangement – they get to use their net and gain experience of handling terns, we get to use our rings and benefit from any subsequent information derived from recaptures. They seem a decent enough bunch, these wanderers from East Kent. The setting up of the net takes a while and safety precautions take up a lot of the time - a cannon net is, after all, propelled by explosives. I am asked to take up a position westward...