Back to brown

A short interlude from lovely bright things to rubbish browny black things. No, not Tapaculos. Wanstead. I've always struggled to get back into local birding after a trip away, it just seems so unsatisfying. This is magnified when returning from the neotropics. So much so that I simply hid my binoculars when I got home from Brazil and it was only as recently as the end of last week that I finally dug them out again and faced the inevitable.

The patch.

My last proper visit was in mid-May when it was green. It is now brown and parched, and as some of you may have spotted in the news, burned and blackened. A familiar story each summer. This time it was over near Alex where the crack dens are, no surprises what happened. Bob and I strolled over there on Thursday morning to take a look. Of course this area has been burned to a crisp several times before, and in fact the Corporation has vastly reduced the amount of cover there in an effort to, er, smoke them out. Still, there remained enough to create a fire of sufficient size to require ten fire engines and 70 firefighters....

The patch news does not end there though. On the banks of Alex, wader-free as always, Bob and I put up a Grey Wagtail. This was actually a year tick and so very exciting. I've been somewhat half-hearted in my pursuit of patch ticks this year, and after a few abortive trips to the stables and the Old Sewage Works earlier in the year I had given up knowing full well that several Grey Wagtail would fly over my head on the Flats in the autumn. So it's a fraction early but I'll take it.

Then on Friday I went for a short bike ride on the patch, through the Park and then across to the Flats. I was minding my own business next to Alex, thinking vaguely about counting the Geese even though I'd pointlessly counted them all on Thursday. Listlessly I scanned the Gulls. Oh, an adult Yellow-legged Gull. Par for the course in late summer and, just like that, another year tick. 

I'm off for a lie down.

YLG. Phone shot. Mmmm mmmm.