A site revisited

The other day I had to go out birding four times! This is a very good sign. For some reason I am now taking more of an interest in my year list, whereas in the spring I do not recall being as enthused. I suppose spring is exciting as everything is new and it heralds the end of the gloom, but autumn is just better - there is greater diversity and birds linger. We have had as many as 11 Whinchat on the patch recently, for multiple days. I've maxed out at seven, a little short of my record of 10 some years back, but this is nonethless very pleasing. Especially when they are accompanied by other goodies. Last week I nipped out to the VizMig spot and had six Whinchat, four Wheatear and a Tree Pipit within a hundred yards and ten minutes. Five minutes from my door! Five!! 

The Tree Sparrow seems to have gone - two days I think, possibly three. That will almost certainly be the best bird of the year. More suprisingly the Wryneck was never seen again, which is the first time that this has happened. Usually they stick but this one turned out be a one day wonder. Possibly proximity to the very loud funfair convinced it to move on, so I was fortunate to get it at the first attempt.

On Sunday a juvenile Cuckoo appeared. Remarkably this was on exactly the same day as I saw Cuckoo here last year, and it clearly can't be a returning bird! Nick found it somewhere near Long Wood, and when I toddled out a little while later I almost trod on it in the Brick Pits. It had been feeding on the ground, and on seeing me flew up and away. It did not go far, and I put it up again as soon as turned the corner. The bird last year stayed for ages, so perhaps this one will be seen again. It is only the third I've ever seen here.

Good as Wanstead Flats has been, my best birding was elsewhere. Rob suggested he might be going to check out East Tilbury, and I cheekily asked if I could join him. Before he could say no Bob, James and Tim piled in too, so much for the quiet life! And so early on Sunday morning we abandoned Wanstead and headed East. I'd not been to East Tilbury since 2011 when I was a much more active local birder in the roving sense. Rainham, Walthamstow, West Thurrock and Amwell, as well as sites like Staines over to the west. Nowadays I am almost solely to be found in Wanstead - probably to my detriment as East Tilbury was amazing.

Wanstead on Tour (photo: James H)

Paul W and Paul H, site regulars, were already there and perhaps a little dismayed to see so many birders descend. Cue many jokes about installing turnstiles, charging for entry and so on. And stringing! We had missed the flock of Little Terns, but the river still delivered over 100 Common Terns and a small number of Black Terns in with them. The receding tide exposed acres of mud upon which hundreds and hundreds of Avocets and Black-tailed Godwits fed, with smaller numbers of Grey Plover, Dunlin, Redshank and Ringed Plover. It was an extraordinary scene - the number of Avocets in particular has grown and grown, with site peak counts of 3000. All I can say was that there were too many to even attempt to count.

Yellow Wagtails zipped overhead, I was lucky enough to get a Tree Pipit doing the same. There were even some Whinchat, not as many as in Wanstead, obviously, but still a new one for my fledgling East Tilbury list. The site has changed a lot in the ten years since I last visited, and there is now a fine new series of scrapes at the far end which commanded most of our interest, not least due to the presence of some lingering Stone Curlew, a species I've not seen for ages. Egrets, ducks, a few Green Sandpiper and a Marsh Harrier completed a fine line up that saw us collectively record 70 species in our short visit. It was a great couple of hours and we all agreed we would be back once we work out how to negotiate the new barbed wire that Hawky said is about to be fitted. By him. 

Florida IV - Day 3, Part 3 - Smaller waders

Day 3, smaller waders

What, you're still here? And you want more?? Well, if you insist I suppose. Ha! I know you don't and I'm afraid that cuts no ice at all. Here are a selection of the smaller waders on Bunche Beach...

Semipalmated Plover

Wilson's Plover. A much beefier bird than the others.

Least Sandpiper

Western Sandpiper

Piping Plover

Sanderling

Turnstone

Florida IV - Day 3, Part 2 - Larger waders

Day 2, larger waders

This post is the second one about a three hour session on Bunche Beach at Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast in Florida. It is an exceptionally good location for wader photography, the best I have found, but only with very careful planning. That means checking tide times and the weather. I've got this wrong just once and it won't happen again. People after words rather than photographs should probably click their "back" button about now. People who want to look at six subtly different images of Marbled Godwit, by all means continue... There will be a third post on smaller waders - the Peeps as they're known. 

Willet

Short-billed Dowitcher

Grey Plover

Marbled Godwit

Black(wit) Gold

Last night I made a plan. I would get up early and go birding. Then I would go to the sorting office to pick up a parcel. Then I would go to the dump. And then I would go shopping so that I wouldn't have to eat any more tomatoes. You could make a movie about my life... Normally when I make plans that involve waking up early to go birding what happens is that I do indeed wake up early, but then I flop around in bed for an hour and the opportunity passes. Not so this morning, and so just before 6am I was walking around Alex checking for waders. It appeared I had beaten the dog walkers for once, and although I could see a couple out for a walk ahead of me they were thankfully not tracking right on the edge. The place was mine.

At the eastern corner I scanned back along the south side, nothing. Then I scanned the east side up towards the road. Gah!! There was a Black-tailed Godwit stood on the edge preening. I could honestly not believe it, I mean, really? This is the stuff dreams are made of! The enormity of what I was looking at began to sink in. I grabbed a record shot in case it flew (which I fully expected it to do any moment), cruel luck that I didn't have the big lens with me, and then started to try and tell people. I was shaking like a leaf by this point, this is what local patch birding does to you. You simply don't get this kind of emotion twitching things, I can't really begin to describe it.

I alerted the local WhatsApp group, just about managing to type out the magic words on the keyboard as my fingers fluttered. After getting the all-important record shot, the first thing that I had to do was let fellow patch-workers know. I honestly could not imagine who wouldn't do this, these moments simply need to be shared. It would be a fabulous blocker and who doesn't like a good blocker, but that just isn't the way it works. We are a group and whilst there is friendly competition we're all in it together. I've been birding here for 14 years and this is my first as most waders are totally mega here.....then I realised it was my 150th bird for the patch, and was stunned all over again. Meanwhile the bird had resumed feeding so I went around the eastern edge to get the light behind me and some better photos. The bird was remarkably tame all things considered - had I had a longer lens I could have murdered it. 

Lying on the ground I spotted Tony wandering around the south edge of the lake. He didn't seem to be hurrying.... I waved, he waved back. I pointed at the bank, but I think he thought I was photographing a Gull or something! With all other options exhausted I shouted and pointed! This got his attention, as did the bird flying a short distance along the edge of the water! Now he started running! When he arrived he too was in disbelief, a patch Black-tailed Godwit and on the deck too. It was a beautiful bird, loads of summer colour still and it seemed to be fairly settled. I thought about heading home for the big lens but I was enjoying the moment too much, it isn't necessarily always about the image. Bob turned up having hurried across the Flats after getting my news, it was a tick for him too - in fact the only people who had Blackwit on their lists are Nick with a flyover a few years back and then (naturally) Dan Dan the Wader Man with six in the Park (although we suspect he brought them with him and then released them...). So whilst it has now reduced somewhat in patch blocker value it remains a great patch bird and I am beyond delighted. 

150 species, a personal milestone - 14 years diligently (and not so diligently!) birding the patch proves beyond any doubt that inland urban birding is hard work. Waders are the big target here, we know they fly between the reservoirs and the river, it's just a question of being there either when they go over or being jammy enough to encounter one on the deck. The Godwit happens to be my 14th species of Wader, so a rather neat one per year since I moved here. Bob, Tony and I checked out the Ornamentals in case species #15 had decided to drop in. It hadn't and so I was able to continue with my plan. You had forgotten about my plan? I hadn't. You will be pleased to hear the remaining elements all went perfectly, but probably don't require description. Things are not yet that dire.

Odd duck

Note the can of Fosters floating in the background. I hate people.

The Rainham tick trail redux

There was news yesterday evening of a Marsh Sandpiper at Rainham. I sat and thought about it for a while. Marsh Sandpiper? Don't think I have seen many of those, did I see one in London? Not sure, let me check. As it happens if I had seen one in London I would have had to have been nine years old, as the last record was in 1984! This then was my Saturday morning - a twitch. Rainham is OK, a bit far I suppose but I have not twitched anything since the Little Bunting at Walthamstow in January so I didn't mind doing a few miles. This would be a triple - Rainham, London and Essex, so surely worth it.

With the weather having turned, I was confident the bird would be there this morning and whilst I got up relatively early I did not try that hard - unlike Rob "insomniac" Sheldon who commonly hits the patch at 5am. That was my plan too - there is currently a glut of Little Egret on the Ornamental Waters/Heronry, counts approaching 40 have been recorded and I was keen to get in on the action. However when the news came through at 6am that the Marsh Sandpiper was still there I regretfully abandoned thoughts of Egrets and drove straight to RM. Howard, his usual altruistic self, was there opening up and Ruth B was just setting out to the northern boardwalk where Andy was currently watching the bird on Aveley Pools. We didn't hurry, had a little natter, and were soon approaching the first viewing platform where we could see Andy, Hawky and TB. 

"Quick it's flying!" exclaimed Tony.

Of course it is, great gag TB. Funny man! OK, so where is it?

"I'm still on it, just to the left of the radar tower, high!" said Hawky. "I've lost it", said Tony.

"I though you were joking, you know, larking about!!?" 

"Nah, it flew with a Redshank just as you arrived, wondered why you weren't hurrying!"

Well crap. 34 years and I'm 15 seconds too late. High south. Not coming back. Next stop Sussex. Poo. So, pleasantries were exchanged, never let a big dip get in the way of being polite etc, and then with a nasty black cloud looming Gripper Tweed and Gripper Hawkins left, high-fiving every three paces. Ruth and I looked at each other and then at the cloud. It was easy decision, and so with Gripper Brown in tow we returned to the visitor centre passing Dippers Bacon and Mo on the way. So, not the ideal way to resume my twitching career after a six month break, but one should not dwell on these things or they will consume you. I've seen many birds come and go this year and not felt the slightest twitchy inclination, so not seeing another one didn't sting in the same way it might for others.

I hung around the visitor centre for a while chatting to a few London birders I'd not seen for a while having been "out of it", and then made my way home. There were after all several tonnes of Little Egret to go and count on the patch. Just as I turned off at Ilford the Marsh Sandpiper landed back on Aveley. The North Circular junction at Ilford is under a flyover and you can therefore get straight back on should you so choose. If for example you had just dipped a rare wader out on the A13 and were headed north on the A406, you could swing around and head south again if the bird was relocated. Very convenient. I arrived back at RM shortly thereafter and repeated my journey out to the northern boardwalk, this time without the rain. And this time at the end of my trot there was a Marsh Sandpiper, so all was well that ended well.

The bird was right on the other side, so I had excellent scope views but did not bother with the camera. Here instead is a twitch photo. Note a much happier Steve B on the right. This is my 195th Rainham species, and my 258th for London. I've some way to go to join the top listers of course, but lists are not everything I find. A fair number of the Wanstead guys had made the journey as well, and the viewing platform was all smiles and happiness, including Ruth who had staked serious money on the bird coming back. I should have listened to her! I saw the Prof as I left, on his way to erasing 34 years of pain and anguish. Apparently not living in London is no barrier to maintaining a London list. I have trouble maintaining a Wanstead list, not sure how he does it! Anyway, the rest of the day has been spent in the normal fashion piddling around in the greenhouse and earning brownie points. Ah yes, good old BPs, they still feature very heavily.....

What do you mean you can't see it?

Waders – a decade of retrospection

As I intimated in a recent post, Waders are the holy grail on my local patch. Given the lack of current activity on the patch I thought I might revisit past glories, all 13 of them. Always a lot of blogging mileage in memory. So here are the last 13 years. Slow going? Oh yes.....

Common Snipe
For many years I don’t think I recorded a single Wader on the Flats, they were all but impossible. Although I had been birding the patch for around four years by then, I didn’t record my first wader until 2008! This is a combination of me being pathetic and waders being difficult, back then probably more the former. It was of course a Common Snipe, probably the commonest Wader in terms of number of sightings. They’re a winter resident (although not in 2017!) and until recently an amble around the SSSI was likely to see a Common Snipe take off with a throaty rasp from the long grass towards Jubilee. Almost a gimmee really, or that’s what I would have said before this year.

Wood Sandpiper
I didn’t get anything else in 2008, but my second Wader on the patch, in 2009, remains one of my best. It was in mid-August and I was just approaching Alex early in the morning. Remarkably I think I got there before any of the dog-walkers, and the next thing I knew a small wader with a white rump was flying fast and low away from me down the south side of the pond. It didn’t make a sound, and it was distinctly brown rather than the black-and-white impression that Green Sandpipers can give. I reflected all day and called it a Wood Sandpiper – probably a little naively in retrospect – I think today I would either have let it go, or more likely I’m just a better birder and would have called it easily. In any event there is a happy ending as a couple of years later in early April 2011 I caught up with a bird on Angel Pond, and this one left no room for doubt at all.

Woodcock
I first recorded Woodcock on the Flats in the winter of 2009. At the time this was a huge surprise to me, but I think I’ve seen one almost every year since then. Another winter visitor, they tend to bury themselves deep in cover during the day, and either you wait for a regular bird to come out into the open (which is my tactic these days), or it is just pure blind luck that you bump into a day-flying bird. I’ve only ever flushed one bird, which exploded from underneath a bush in the boggy bit of the SSSI. All the others have been fly-bys in broad daylight and have given the most amazing views. Not amazing enough to have ever caught one on film, the one (really good) opportunity I had was when the first one I ever saw cruised by about ten feet above the ground all the way from one horizon to the other when I was stood out in the middle of Wanstead Flats. All I could do was stare at it dumbfounded with my camera dangling uselessly by my side as it crossed my field of vision almost infinitely slowly. Sometimes this is just the way birding should be.

Lapwing
By number, Lapwing is the most common Wader I’ve seen in Wanstead - 730 birds on the patch over years. This is still largely down to one extraordinary day in February 2012 when I recorded nearly 400. That snowy day also saw my first Jack Snipe and Golden Plover, but it was the Lapwing that stood out as they regularly flew over in groups ranging from 10 or so to over 40. My first were actually in December 2009, I was birding in the Park near Perch Pond and all of a sudden I thought I heard a Lapwing. Then there were 12 birds above me heading north. What a score! I was flabbergasted of course, but retained enough composure to race home and stand in the garden, where shortly after I got another bird flying south. It remains the only one I’ve ever seen from the garden. These days along with Snipe and perhaps Common Sandpiper it is the most likely Wader on the patch, and is most commonly associated with winter movements in hard weather, as on that amazing day in 2012. If you don’t have that however it becomes a lot harder, and it’s entirely possible to have a blank year as I did in 2016.

Dunlin
I still remember this as if it were yesterday, this tiny wader pottered along the shoreline of Jubilee Pond all day in April 2010. You could practically reach out and stroke it, it had clearly not seen people before, not even the local drunks could phase it. I visited it twice, once I think very rapidly for the pure twitch, and then again later in the day with a camera, though as you can see I did not make the most of it. Still the only one I’ve seen in over 10 years, which makes it one of the rarest patch birds.

Common Sandpiper
This is another annually expected bird, though I did not see my first until May 2010. I’ve now seen a total of 19, and they seem to be commonest on the concrete sides of Heronry pond in the months of April and August. I love flicky flight which along with their characteristic bobbing makes them very charismatic little birds. I think my best year was 2011 when I saw seven.

Little Ringed Plover
I remember excitedly finding my first LRP sitting in the gravel carpark next to the Alex in March 2012. I was there twitching a Common Sandpiper which had disappeared. I did a double-take as a small wader flew past me that appeared to have a black and white collar. Hang on a minute, Common Sand shouldn’t look like that! Nick crashed over, I think it was a first for him too. Since then I’ve seen another four or five, one was quite a friendly bird that hung about on what we call the Police Scrape for a few days, and more recently a veritable flock of three birds were on a dried-out Heronry pond in April 2017. In a way I am surprised I have not seen more of these, I suspect we do get more that arrive at night but that they are pushed off very early by the almost constant disturbance.

Stone Curlew
Remarkably I’ve seen two Stone Curlews on Wanstead Flats – this is a scarce bird in a national context, let alone London. The first was found by Nick one morning in April 2011 and he was the sole observer, but the following morning he found it again, this time flying back west, happily towards where I was. He was over near the forbidden triangle somewhere and I had been on my way home and was sprinting to get past Coronation Copse for a clear view. As I desperately approached the wood, movement to my right caught my eye – the distinctive black and white wings of a Stone Curlew folding up into the long grass near Centre Copse and the VizMig Point. Despite people converging on the area it was never seen again. I thought this would be a blocker for all the ages, but two years later in late March 2013 I was walking west across Wanstead Flats when I noticed a low-flying bird some distance ahead of me. I lost it almost immediately as it flew over Centre Road, but all my senses were screaming Stone Curlew despite the unlikeliness. I made a bold call to put the news out and get people on site, and happily about five minutes later was able to confirm my strong suspicions as I caught it banking over motorcycle wood. It disappeared yet again before anybody else had managed to turn up, but I think about half an hour later a number of people got some prolonged flight views as the bird circled over Long Wood before deciding that Wanstead was a little busy and heading north, probably over my garden!

Green Sandpiper
For ages and ages this was my local wader nemesis. I almost always missed birds which were frequently fly-overs, and it seemed for years that I was the only person missing this species. I finally scored over near Alex in July 2011 when 2 birds came off the lake and happily flew more or less past me. Since then I’ve seen few more singles and a flock of four over the SSSI. The only bird on the ground was bird pottering around the edge of Shoulder of Mutton Pond in the park.

Oystercatcher
Probably the least satisfying of all my wader ticks, in heavy fog one morning the undmistakable kleep of an Oystercatcher came from the murk ahead of me somewhere. Never saw it on a morning where I could barely see a few paces in front of me. Still, they all count. Earlier this year I had what I thought was another on another murky day, but as it only called once I let it go. As it happened this was the same day where the first returning bird was found on the Thames a short while later. I wonder….

Jack Snipe

I’ve seen a couple Jack Snipe, but the first was the most memorable. It was day of 400 Lapwings, and after most of these dried up a number of us were checking out the mostly frozen Alex as there had been a Med Gull. All of a sudden a wader came in, skidded on the ice and came to a halt under the branches. It looked small and the beak looked short. Tim had a clearer view of it as he was standing on the other side of the pond and confirmed our suspicions! We went around to join him and it started to bob…. The second was far less exciting, but Nick cornered a suspect in the ditch near Alex in 2013. It came up and flew to the larger ditch of despair, and then did a nice close flight to allow all of us to see that it was clearly a Jack.

Golden Plover
Remember that day I told you about with nearly 400 Lapwings and that Jack Snipe? (Hint, this was in the previous paragraph. If you can’t remember then you have a problem). When we all moved over to join Tim for better views of the Jack Snipe six Golden Plover swept over from the east. My shout, well scream really, could probably have been heard at Rainham. A memorable moment. I’ve seen a few more since then, including twitching some late in the afternoon from my moving car following a stressful journey back to the patch from a national twitch. Astonishingly those two birds were then joined by a third overnight, and relocated to Police Scrape where a short period of crawling through frozen mud allowed some relatively close photos.

Curlew
My last and final patch wader, there has been nothing new for me since these birds in 2013. Dan (Dan the wader man) had scored a flock of about a dozen in poor visibility earlier in the morning, and the rest of us were now out and about on the patch hoping for more. And morose. I found Dan and his magic satchel and stuck to him like glue. Sure enough, somewhere near the vizmig point the magic occurred and all of a sudden there were two Curlews over our heads. They must have come from the nearby playing fields as I didn’t see the satchel open, but who knows. It was over in a split second or so it felt like, but I can remember it as if it were yesterday. Needless to say there are no photos, but no photo could really cover the depth of this experience nor convey the absurd excitement.