Squacco Heron

Last Friday a Squacco Heron was reported at Pagham North Wall. Having previously dipped two opportunities to see one along the south coast I was keen to have a look but with no further sightings on the Friday it looked as though it had moved on. In some ways I hoped it had. I had commitments over the weekend and would not be able to get out to see it.

Sure enough, Saturday morning it was refound and reports of sightings appeared for the rest of the day. Would it stay? The 2015 Cuckmere bird had gone within 24 hours of being reported leaving me on a fruitless search at dawn the next morning.

Six o'clock on Sunday evening and I finally made it to the viewing area just by Halsey's Farm. No sign there but I did at least manage to get a few seconds glimpse of it through reeds on the other side of the farm Not a very satisfactory view but it still counted as my first UK Squacco.

Monday morning and we were back at the farm and after a couple of hours wait it flew in and started to feed.

Squacco Heron

It's not an easy bird to photograph in flight. Collins refers to an explosion of white on take off. The eye compensates but the camera has difficulty coping with the contrast.

Squacco Heron

Once on the ground you have the opposite problem. It blends into the background and the camera has difficulty in pulling focus. Solution, take lots of frames and just hope you get a few good ones.

Squacco Heron

Squacco Heron

Squacco Heron

It was only a small twitch but you have to respect other people's right to see the bird. That inevitably means that you are too far away to get the picture that you really want. I was happy though, I had my record shots and the perfect picture could wait until the next time I was in Spain.


I have had something of a quiet summer birding wise. A focus on Orchids and a seeming lack of migrating birds late spring and early summer has left me some thirty to forty birds behind my usual totals for this time of year. Sussex can be really dead through the summer but today you just got the feeling that things were starting to liven up again.

Wood Sandpiper with Common Sandpiper in foreground

Wood Sandpiper

Wood Sandpiper on the Ferry Pool at Pagham and Common Sandpiper, below, in the Ferry Channel.

Common Sandpiper

It will be interesting to see if I can make up the numbers during the autumn migration but I fear that a few will have already gone.

Pectoral Sandpiper

The birding and bird photography always seems to go through a bad spell when I come home from a trip abroad. You move from seeing new and unusual birds every day back to seeing all the home front supporting cast with just the occasional bird that raises the interest levels. Except, this past month, Sussex seems to be devoid of anything really interesting. Even regular trips up onto Cissbury Ring have failed to see me connect with the usually reliable Ring Ouzels up there.

I have been out and I have seen lots of birds but it seems as though, most days, I come home without bothering to take a single picture and it has been six weeks since I did my last blog post.

A trip to Pulborough today to see the Pectoral Sandpiper has motivated me to start blogging again. The pictures were not good, the Pec Sand stayed at the back of the pool and a distant brown bird against a brown background is not the easiest of subjects but hey, it was enough to get me going again.

Pectoral Sandpiper

The bird was to be found in front of the West Mead hide, on the mud at the back right hand corner of the pool. I watched it for about an hour and went back later in the morning for another go but it seemed to be faithful to this area and was not going to give a better picture opportunity.

Pectoral Sandpiper

There wasn't a great deal more to look at around Pulborough. Duck numbers were stating to build on the West Mead pool but the North Brooks were mostly empty of birds, with some major re-profiling work going on there.

Shoveler

Wigeon

Needing some more content for the blog I then looked back over the pictures I had taken over the past few weeks. Nothing special but not quiet as bad as I had remembered.

Black-tailed Godwit at Pagham North Wall

Chiffchaff at Brooklands Park

Common Sandpiper  in the Ferry Channel

Looking for somewhere sheltered to roost

Distant Spoonbills at Pagham North Wall

Wheatear  - Pagham North Wall

Wheatear - Pagham North Wall

Migration now seems to be well underway and the bird numbers are picking up. The clear, cold and crisp day of winter may be few and far between but they are by far the best for taking photographs. All we need now are some good birds.

Little Gull and Little Tern

With the small car park in Easton Lane now open, the Stilt Pools at Medmerry seem a little more accessible, but it can still be a bleak walk in when the cold south westerlies are coming in off the sea. Some days you get down there and there is just nothing to look at. Fortunately today was just the opposite. A nice sunny day and lots of birds. Photography is difficult, you are just that bit too far away from the action, but today there was certainly a lot to look at.

Perhaps the best bird of the day was an adult Little Gull. When I arrived it was asleep on the back of an island and I could well have missed it. So my thanks to Peter Hughes the warden for pointing it out. I had to wait a while for it to fly and then had about ten minutes of trying to photograph it before it moved on. Good practice for the Little Terns that were to come.

All I could see at first was just the one Little Tern out on the back of a sandy bar. Perhaps more came in or perhaps they had been better hidden hidden but eventually there were five or maybe six present.

I always forget just how small the Little Terns are. The picture below shows one alongside Black-headed Gulls which themselves are at the smaller end of the Gull family.

Small, fast, highly manoeuvrable, and a nightmare to try to photograph. You need a big lens on to get close enough for a picture but even if you can track them my lens will not focus fast enough to get the shot. The pictures below are not perfect but you should see the hundreds that have been deleted as unrecognisable

The islands look a bit short of the shingle that the Little Terns like for nesting but there is always a chance. They would at least get some protection here as the Avocets that nest at the site are very aggressive parents and see off a lot of the predators.

Also present were at least six Little Ringed Plovers. This pair look as though they are trying out nest sites.

There were a lot of other birds using the pools including a Common Sandpiper, and a brilliantly coloured Yellow Wagtail.

Common Sandpiper

Yellow Wagtail

Catching a fly -  at 1/2000 of a second and still not sharp

Also a lot of birds in the long grass around the pools.

Meadow Pipit

Meadow Pipit

Skylark

Nice also to see some young about. This young Moorhen even looks halfway pretty.

Other shots taken this week. A Black Swan On Chichester Gravel Pits. They always take a nice picture. I wonder how long it will be before they are on the British list.

Tuesday it was back to Pulborough with Dave so that he could catch up with the Nightingales. He is just back from a weeks birding in Spain with stories and pictures of Bee Eaters, Collard Pratincoles, Squacco Heron, Gallinule, etc. etc. See his blog here for some good pictures but I think good old British Nightingales take some beating

 A great weeks birding so far. Spring seems to be on hold at the moment but that just means that when the cold weather stops we still have the spring migration to come - I hope.

Cyprus

I had a week in Cyprus over Christmas on a family holiday. Whilst that meant no going off  by myself for the day birding, I did still get to see plenty of birds. We were based in Paphos so a walk around the headland always presented a good opportunities to see the birds, although unfortunately, not the Greater Sand Plover that I had been told were almost guaranteed there.

Waders were in short supply and the only ones I saw, Common Sandpipers and Golden Plover, hardly set the heart racing. Pictures were also harder to come by as I did not have the large lens with me.

Common Sandpiper

Common Sandpiper

Golden Plover

Golden Plover

And with a Kingfisher sitting by one of the rock pools it felt just like being at home.

Kingfisher

The most common birds were House Sparrows, Larks, Black Redstarts, Stonechats and Hooded Crows.

Crested Lark

Crested Lark

Woodlark

Woodlark

Skylark

Black Redstart

Hooded Crow

Hooded Crow and Kestrel

We had one day up in the Troodos mountains and this was the one that I had been looking forward to. I had great hopes of seeing some decent raptors - but it didn't happen. We got up over 6000ft and had some great views out over the valleys but there were no birds flying. All I saw all day were Chaffinches and Sparrows and one very distant raptor that was too far away to identify.


Back down on the Paphos headland I finally caught up with a couple of decent birds, a Spanish Sparrow and a Sardinian Warbler.

Spanish Sparrow

Sardinian Warbler

Sardinian Warbler

I didn't see any signs of shooting or of the lime sticks that I have seen on other Mediterranean islands but there were caged birds around, in particular Turtle Doves. Its sad when I think how long I spend each year trying to see them in the UK.

Linnet

As always, I would have liked to have seen more. Perhaps I will be able to get back sometime in the future and spend a bit more time tracking down some of the birds but that's it for now.