Twenty years Part II

Well well. Am I on a roll or what? For reasons I don't fully understand (although I suspect laziness) I've been spending more time skywatching from the balcony recently. Of course what I should have been doing is getting my arse in gear super early and getting out onto Wanstead Flats at first light but I am finding I can't quite get myself over the line. Instead I've been waking up at around 6am, having a bit of a potter, making a coffee, and then sauntering over to the battlements for a squiz at the sky. All nice and relaxed.

This takes me right back to what I found to be one of the most enjoyable features of lockdown, and which somehow I've dropped along the way. Skywatching. Back then I added 15 new species in two years to my at-that-time 18 year old garden list, but until earlier this year I hadn't added a single new species since May 2021. That changed with the singing Nightingale in April of this year, and last month I reached my 100th species with Great White Egret, as recounted here. Mission accomplished, and part of me thought that was that. Not so!

With news from the less feckless out giving it their all on Wanstead Flats that there was a Nuthatch in Long Wood, a highly unusual occurence, I wondered out loud whether there could be a movement happening and might I finally get one on my garden list? About 15 minutes later that is exactly what happened. As usual the Parakeets were drowning most other things out, but from over towards the southern end of Bush Wood I thought I heard a faint call. Immediately I was on maximum alert, every last percent of my hearing focussed on that one horizon, hands cupped behind my ears. Had I imagined it? I had not! It called again several times, the double chuitt one. GET IN! 

Twenty years. Nearly twenty-one. Nuthatch had been high on my list of possibilities, but I had assumed it would be a foraging bird moving through the gardens in winter. Given James' news from the Flats perhaps this is post-breeding dispersal? Equally the birds are resident there and in many ways I am surprised never to have heard one in all of my many skywatching sessions. Either way it is now on the list. I wonder what will be next?

Nuthatch - probably took this over ten years ago