Trektellen time
Trektellen, the website that collates migration counts, is a wonderful place to while away a few hours. This Dutch site has spread its wings across Europe, and the number of contributing sites - including British - keeps on growing. As much as most of us think of meaningful visible migration counts coming from coastal sites, there are a number of inland sites that have provided some excellent data. As a county, Surrey is poorly represented. I thought it about time to increase its contribution.
Anybody who has visited this blog on a regular basis will know that I love watching migration in action, particularly if it is local to me here in Banstead. It just means more. Luckily I have two sites on my doorstep (one of them literally) that provides such thrills. My garden has a good track record in the autumn - thrush rushes (4,000 Redwings in a day), four figure hirundine days, hundreds of finches, pipits, the odd unexpected bird (Woodlark, Golden Plover, Honey Buzzard, Hawfinch) - and by October I can expect a daily dose of this kind of stuff. The other site is Canons Farm, maybe a mile and a bit to the north of the garden, where I have experienced similar hirundine and thrush days, plus witnessed a spectacular hard weather movement.
So, I contacted Clive McKay, one of Trektellen’s team of administrators, and asked him to set up these two sites on their database. He suggested that, because they are so close, it might be better to merge them under one - called Banstead - and when entering my data make reference to which watchpoint I was present at. Job done! The first entry has now been made.
They might not be Dungeness, nor Spurn, but believe me, it sometimes feels like they are.
Anybody who has visited this blog on a regular basis will know that I love watching migration in action, particularly if it is local to me here in Banstead. It just means more. Luckily I have two sites on my doorstep (one of them literally) that provides such thrills. My garden has a good track record in the autumn - thrush rushes (4,000 Redwings in a day), four figure hirundine days, hundreds of finches, pipits, the odd unexpected bird (Woodlark, Golden Plover, Honey Buzzard, Hawfinch) - and by October I can expect a daily dose of this kind of stuff. The other site is Canons Farm, maybe a mile and a bit to the north of the garden, where I have experienced similar hirundine and thrush days, plus witnessed a spectacular hard weather movement.
So, I contacted Clive McKay, one of Trektellen’s team of administrators, and asked him to set up these two sites on their database. He suggested that, because they are so close, it might be better to merge them under one - called Banstead - and when entering my data make reference to which watchpoint I was present at. Job done! The first entry has now been made.
They might not be Dungeness, nor Spurn, but believe me, it sometimes feels like they are.
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