So lockdown continues and the garden and it's immediate environs are the only place I'm able to get a nature fix but it still has the capacity to turn up surprises. Having found a Cetti's Warbler volleying out it's song in a reedy ditch and bramble tangle a couple of fields downhill from home, I decided to have a speculative vigil listening out from the front bedroom window where the traffic is now much calmer. Quite a few years ago packing the car for a 3am start, heading for the airport and a Scandanavian adventure, yielded my only ever singing Nightingale from the garden. The cold, still air and lack of traffic noise left it audible over perhaps a kilometre, I figured that the same could happen if a Cetti's had moved into the reedy fringes of the nearby reservoir. It was a good hunch and within 20 minutes I heard the explosive song punctuate the night. It wasn't to be my only garden tick this week as yesterday, in an unprepossessing northerly blow, an Osprey arced low around the horizon and seemed to head down towards Barway being mobbed by Rooks.
Despite these great highlights I have been dwelling on the Morrocan family holiday that we've missed. I had to scratch the itch and remind myself what I was missing so rooted out the pictures from my last trip there with Mark Hawkes, Simon Patient and Ben. What a brilliant country to watch fantastic birds in - hopefully it'll be possible to visit next spring but in the meantime I've enjoyed the cathartic process of re-living some of these memories.
Bald Ibis (pic -Simon Patient)
Lesser Crested Tern (pic Simon Patient)
Black-crowned Tchagra
Seebohm's Wheatear
Crimson-winged Finch (pic Simon Patient)
Maghreb Wheatear
Cream-coloured Courser
Stone Curlew
Temminck's Horned Lark
Thick-billed Lark
Thick-billed Lark (pic Simon Patient)
Hoopoe Lark (pic Simon Patient)
Red-rumped Wheatear (pic Simon Patient)
Pharaoh Eagle Owl
Blue-cheeked Beeater
Atlas Flycatcher (pic Simon Patient)
Egyptian Nightjar
Desert Sparrow (pic Simon Patient)
African Desert Warbler (pic Simon Patient)
Moussier's Redstart
Tristram's Warbler
Weatern Orphean Warbler
Duponts Lark
Lesser Kestrel
Hawfinch
Red-knobbed Coot
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