May already and still no Sand Martin at the basin, other people have noticed the non-appearance of this species so something is clearly going on. A few birds were moving around in the copse this morning so I decided to employ a tactic I like to call "wait and see", basically you just wait and see what (if anything) turns up, does what it says on the tin. After about 20 minutes I got on to a warbler feeding high in a Sycamore, a male Common Whitethroat, strangely silent given the sunny weather but a welcome yeartick nonetheless, this species is also a little late and winters in roughly the same area of trans-Saharan Africa as Sand Martin, could there be a connection here? I seem to remember that there was a massive Whitethroat crash a few years back and Sand Martin numbers suffered too, time will tell. Another Common Whitethroat was in the ecology park, singing this time, albeit quietly and furtively, as was the only Reed Warbler I could find but at least five Blackcaps were in good voice throughout the site. Other notables today included a female Northern Wheatear along the promenade at Bow Creek, possibly the photogenic bird from yesterday; four Common Sandpipers in the high tide roost, seven Shelduck and two Common Terns at the basin and a vocal Oystercatcher, heard but not seen at Bow Creek. I spent a couple of hours at Gallions Reach in the afternoon and added Mute Swan, Sandwich Tern and Lesser Whitethroat to my site list other notables were a Lapwing flying east along the Thames, three Common Sandpipers feeding on the foreshore, four Common Terns, six Swallows flying north, two Common Whitethroats and a Skylark.
No comments:
Post a Comment