A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck.

In this case, I just got lucky...

I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating. 

After a meandering walk of 20 minutes I arrived on site and it was soon apparent that a few Meadow Pipits were on the move, small groups of 15-20 birds heading in a south-east direction, a few circling before carrying on out to sea, a couple of 50-100 flocks also being observed. The morning's total would eventually reach 1,040, but as impressive as this was, it was just the warm up act.

Hirundines began to appear at about 07.30hrs, mainly Swallows, with a modest flow heading south-eastwards out to sea, many quite high. I was then joined by Martin Casemore, who positioned himself with his scope and tripod on the last shingle ridge before it plunges into the sea - he scanned seaward, and I, standing a few meters away, concentrated my gaze inland. Slowly, the hirundine numbers started to build, the departure point widening to take in most of the visible beach northwards of where we stood and south towards the new lighthouse. At times the hirundine stream quickened, with pulses of birds that got us both excited - but there then came a moment when the pulses didn't recede at all. 

Between us, Martin and I have close to 100 years of birding experience and neither of us had witnessed what was about to unfold before our eyes. Words will not be able to adequately describe the experience, but words are all that I have to try and do so. Here goes.

We were assaulted by hirundines. Standing frozen on the shingle birds flew straight at us, flicking passed with last second changes of direction, arrows made of feather and bone, urgent. To our right, to our left and up above, they came and kept on coming. Hundreds, if not thousands in view at the same moment, with the Swallows now being joined by House Martins, the latter dinkier than their more streamlined congeners. My overriding memory is of a mixture of dark Swallow darts and pied Martins in a kaleidoscope of activity, as if we were standing in a giant snow globe that had been violently shaken. We didn't want it to end but we were expecting it to slow down. It didn't.

We were joined by Tom Wright and John Young, who had both been birding a few hundred metres inland but were drawn to the shore by this dramatic exodus. We stood in a shared awe at what was being played out before us. As if the 'snow globe' effect was not enough there were shouts as it became obvious that there was a mass gathering of hirundines (almost exclusively of House Martins) above the southern power station building. Thousands. They more resembled midges than birds, a churn of specks and dots that were readying for a flight across the sea. It was hypnotic. It was mesmeric.

And then, in one of the most spine-tingling moments that I have enjoyed while birding, the dam burst. Tom described it as an avalanche. Neither descriptions are adequate. Whereas before the birds were leaving on a wide front they now concentrated into a narrow point of departure, one maybe as wide as a motorway, pouring off the shingle and over the sea, low down - a moving carpet, a conveyer belt, gushing, a torrent - none of it does it justice. This carried on, unbroken, for maybe 20 minutes. It was as if the birds had become part of a single organism, that they were no longer individuals but had become locked into a trance, hypnotised into joining an urgent race to leave British shores and start the journey to South Africa, a primal instruction that they had to obey and had no control over. And, at the same time, birds were still moving further along the beach and up above. It did finally start to slow, but each time we thought that the hirundine tap was being turned off they came again - and again - until at about 11.00hrs they finally seemed spent, although they still trickled through until early afternoon.

Numbers? Whatever we came up with would be a vast underestimate. We did minute counts. We tried to estimate whether the flow was increasing or decreasing. We positioned ourselves so that we were looking in different directions so as not to miss birds, but also careful not to double count them. In one particular three-minute spell, when the numbers of birds departing were at insane levels, we estimated that we had been passed by 10,000 birds. We didn't want to over-estimate the numbers but at the same time were mindful of reaching a meaningful count that would give this special movement some kind of accurate figure so that comparisons could be made with movements of the past and those of the future.  Our final estimates were:

126,000 Swallow

84,000 House Martin

500 Sand Martin

There could easily have been a million. I should imagine that the true number was closer to that than what we recorded, but that is pure speculation. But our morning wasn't finished yet.

While we were enjoying the final throes of the hirundine spectacular, several hundred meters away Dave Bunney was watching a small gathering of Chiffchaffs in his garden when a Bonelli's Warbler appeared in their midst. At 11.00hrs the alert went out and those of us at the boats hot-footed it to his beach-side house. Joined by small handful of others, we did not have long to wait before this immaculate warbler, all silky-white underparts and lime-green edged remixes and retrices, appeared before us. It even called, disyllabic and upturned, immediately identifying itself as a Western. Despite the modest size of Dave's garden, it went missing for 10-15 minutes at a time, only to pop up, often in the stunted pines, to give good, if brief views.

And if I'm being honest, throughout my couple of hours with the warbler that day, I did keep turning round to scan the skies, looking to see if those aerial gods, the hirundines, were still moving through.

Timing. My first visit to Dungeness for two-and-a-half years had coincided with the highest numbers of hirundines ever recorded there and the rarest bird seen so far during the year. I'm not always so lucky.