NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

When the whole world and his wife are knee-deep in birds, be they Autumn migrants or eastern vagrants (with a few also coming from the west) it is easy for birders based in places that are not so blessed to get a little peeved. This is especially true if every effort has been made during daylight hours to cover your patch - and particularly if there are few birds to sift through anyway. Such scenarios break birders' spirits and, after a prolonged bout of little return, can force them elsewhere. This has happened this very week to those gathered at Dungeness. Monday saw a car load leave Kent for that most blessed of bird observatories, Spurn. Maybe it really is in God's chosen county after all. They saw 'the bird', several other 'the birds' and hundreds of viewable migrants to boot. On return to the shingle it was as much as any of them could do to muster up any enthusiasm at all, having been gorging on the ornithological feast that East Yorkshire had dished up...

Now that we have autumn upon us, I thought I'd share with you a tremendous day's birding that I had just over the English Channel, at Cap Gris Nez, on October 19th 2004 in the company of Sean McMinn. I have lifted the narrative straight from my notebook. "Weather: Wind SE f2-3, light overcast, dry and cool. We arrived and parked just as the first shards of daylight appeared in the eastern sky. Even though it was far too dark to bird, the birds themselves were already on the move. From the blackness above came the calls of Chaffinches and Bramblings, at first just isolated calls, then small flocks and as the daylight finally broke an unending procession of contact calls. The day had promise (we had already flushed a Long-eared Owl as we approached the headland, seen in the car headlights). Single Ring Ouzel and Woodcock alighted nearby as we were finally allowed to see the birds streaming overhead and assess their numbers. Chaffinches were the dominant species, but Bram...