NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

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

This post is going to be a right old mixed bag of snippets - a potpourri of bits and pieces if you like. That could suggest that I haven't anything of note to impart to you, or there again it could be that I have got much to share - you'll be the judge of that, although my money would be placed heavily on the former.  On the birding front I have been out locally on a regular basis, but it has not been full of success, with efforts to dig out those avian gems largely unrewarded. Bird numbers have remained poor, migrants even more so, although 'keeping on keeping on' has revealed that not every hedgerow, or sky, has been empty. On 16 March, after having left the Hawfinches at Ashurst Roughs (see last post) I went to Canons Farm where there had been reports of high numbers of Stonechats. This species is a typical early spring migrant through the area, where counts in the 6-8 range would be considered high. After last autumn's record shattering numbers through the area