Reach out.

All quiet on the blog I see.  It’s almost as if my fellow authors are not enjoying their birding this autumn.  Certainly the winds haven’t been especially kind so far, but how bad can it be?  I mean, it’s not as if they were on the Yorkshire east coast on the same afternoon a first for Britain was found but somehow contrived not to see it, is it?...

While they’ve been not seeing rare swifts, I’ve been dutifully strolling up and down the Devil’s Dyke and watching autumn slowly begin to take hold.  A steady trickle of redwings and fieldfares have been in evidence for a couple of weeks, and an influx of song thrushes occurred last weekend, right on cue following a similar arrival on the North Norfolk coast a couple of days earlier, witnessed by Ben and me as we scoured the dunes for something a little rarer at Burnham Overy.  We returned from that particular escapade with nothing more notable than a pied fly, redstart and the inevitable yellow-browed warbler, so it was back to the local patch for me.

With the dominant westerly airflow and mostly warm, sunny days it’s all been pretty steady, but the pleasure of working a patch lies in the small day-to-day changes.  Each day brings subtle differences: a preponderance of skylarks one day, the fields covered in starlings the next, a little fall of goldcrests in the scrub or a resting flock of golden plover in the fields. 

It’s not for the sedentary though, I’m clocking up the mileage up and down the Dyke and surrounding countryside, but the miles walked paid off a little this weekend, firstly on Saturday with a splendid male redstart at Reach – the village at the northern end of the Dyke.  This little gem posed for a couple of trademark blurry long-range record shots before one of the local robins chased it off to the far side of the emu paddock, beyond the range at which even I consider photographs acceptable.  

What’s that?  Emu?  Yes, you heard me right, I’ve seen emu in the Ely10 – expect that to turn up on next year’s bird race list for sure.

This was followed up on Sunday by a stonechat on the Dyke – the first after nine months of patrolling my regular route.  Emboldened by this (relative) success, I pressed on further afield, up Reach Lode and across Tubney Fen.  Here I encountered more stonechats while a lone siskin chimed overhead, before a female merlin cruised across the fen, its all-business, laser-direct path in search of an unwary skylark or meadow pipit in stark contrast to the endless random sampling of the hovering kestrels and lazy circling of a lone buzzard overhead.

Finally deciding I’d walked far enough I turned for home and, while grilling a tit flock on the edge of Reach for that ever-elusive inland sprite, a stuttering call revealed a redpoll which flew off to the north, before a quiet chipping attracted my attention to a couple of tree sparrows feeding unobtrusively along the drove.  Improbably I then encountered a small flock of the latter shortly afterwards, at least four birds by a game cover crop on the edge of Swaffham Prior.  I presume these were migrants, as other than a single dispersing bird on the Dyke in August, they were the first I’d seen on patch.  Hopefully they’ll stick around.

All things considered a decent weekend – nothing Earth-shattering, but when you work an inland patch, particularly one without significant waterbodies, one must curtail one’s expectations somewhat and take satisfaction in the scarcities and local oddities that you turn up.  The redstart certainly gave me more joy than the one flitting about in the dunes at Burnham Overy a week earlier.  There are a couple of weeks of autumn proper left, so I’ll keep scouring those tit flocks in the hope of a little striped Phyllosc, surely it's only a matter of time?...