NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

The next instalment of me raiding my old notebooks and adding a bit of embellishment... it is now 1975. Epsom Common was a sedate place to go bird watching. I would catch a bus from Sutton and alight at the edge of the common on the Ashtead road. I had a set routine. Crossing the railway-line I would work my way through scrub (which often provided close views of Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers) until reaching the edge of the woods. A wide ride then took me up through the mature trees – always stopping half way for lunch – until reaching its end that abutted the farmland at Maldon Rushett. A loop back to my starting point was made via a check on the stew pond. I always recorded Willow Tits and I saw my first Little Owl during one memorable late afternoon at the top of the ride. This encouraged a few of us to make, and erect, an owl nest box in the very same area. Whereas a visit to Beddington was one of heightened expectation, these Epsom Common trips were laid back affairs, the time being...

I needed a change of scene - all of this dry inland patch bashing might be terribly worthy, but it's a hard slog. But, being obstinate, instead of rushing to a coastal hotspot I ambled down to the most coastal of inland sites - Pulborough Brooks. During a wet winter it resembles an inland sea, but today it was largely dry. The hedgerows and copses that run down the hill from the visitor centre towards the flood plain were alive with warbler song - mainly Blackcaps, Whitethroats and Chiffchaffs, but also 5 Lesser Whitethroat, 3 Willow Warbler and 2 Garden Warbler. A special mention must be made for that Pulborough icon, the Nightingale. Being the middle of the day, they were not at their most vocal, although three birds did deign to have a bit of a sing-song. Little Egret (6), Common Buzzard (15), Red Kite (2), Hobby (2), Lapwing (30), Redshank, Cuckoo, Sedge Warbler and Raven were additional highlights. A visit to this RSPB reserve is never a chore, always a pleasure, and th...

Regular visitors to this blog (all three of you) will recall that I spent most of July at Dungeness. I've posted a fair bit about the plants and moths that I saw, but so far have not mentioned birds. There's a good reason for that - it was very poor for them. In July 2010 a week at Dungeness provided for me a White-tailed Plover (NOT Lapwing thank you very much), Purple Heron, Great White Egret, Roseate Tern and up to 70 Mediterranean Gulls in one sitting. This year was a case of playing 'Spot the Med Gull'- they must have had a poor breeding season close by - and looking at high water levels on all of the pits that kept the waders away. There were two sudden adrenalin rushes however, when a Little Swift was claimed one murky morning over ARC (we spent an hour searching through a thousand low-flying swifts) and also when a Black Stork was watched drifting above New Romney and I waited at the point, in considerable heat for a few hours, hoping to pick it up drifting s...