Tuesday 12 April 2011

April 10th on the Suffolk coast

I met up with Lee to give a couple of sites a good grilling, truth is we ended up walking lots and seeing little. Thorpeness caravan park had the odd Chiffchaff and Blackcap but little else so we headed towards Sizewell and were rewarded with much of the same. A pied Chaffinch carried on the recent vein of finding aberrant plumaged birds whilst Willow Warblers brightened the mood with the song of the summer. Heading back to the caravan park a couple of Bullfinches called, and a Skylark done its best to impersonate something rarer. The allotments produced a couple of additions to the year list with an elusive Whitethroat sub-singing from the bottom of a bush whilst its cousin, a Lesser Whitethroat showed briefly before doing a bunk.
A walk around North Warren was next and to be honest although it was nice to have the air filled with the songs of summer migrants it some how felt a bit of a let down, perhaps my expectations are to high?
Stopping at the south marsh at North Warren, Lee found a superb adult Spoonbill, I almost certainly drove past it on the way to the caravan park but as I was running late I did not stop but noted a few white dots on the marsh as I passed.
A stop at Hazelwood marshes, and the area looked like it had lots of potential, maybe a Purple Heron would explode from the reeds or a Bee-eater would drift over, neither in fact just more of the same from earlier. The hide did provide a rather wonderful spectacle in the form of 2000+ Black-tailed Godwits in full summer plumage. A distant Buzzard species was seen towards Sudbourne and with periods of hovering certainly pointed towards Rough-legged but views were always distant. I have however never seen a common buzzard hover for any length of time but as it has been know according to the literature so I think it might be best to leave it as a probable.
With news of a possible Iberian Chiffchaff at halfway house Thorpeness I headed back but after searching came up with nothing except a Common Chiffchaff, but based on plumage detail was not the bird that had been trapped and ringed.
With a few days holiday coming up I hope to be knee deep in rares!!

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