Unexpected Asio

May already. How did that happen? The past couple of weeks have sped past in a blur of great crested newt monitoring and breeding bird surveys, and now bat survey season is hoving into view in a most unwelcome manner.

Fortunately, when I have had the time to get out the birding within my Sanctioned Lockdown Exercise Radius has been good, with a steady trickle of birds of (relative) interest in these parts as April has dissolved into May.

Unlike the fleeting visit of the male, the female ring ouzel lingered for the best part of a week in April, and small numbers of wheatears continue to grace the fence posts of their chosen field.

A group of whimbrel flew low over Tubney Fen, and a single turtle dove pitched and rolled its way north through Burwell Fen, where the cuckoos and terns have returned and bar-tailed godwit, great white egret and garganey have put in appearances. The garden was graced with its first lesser whitethroat, rattling away enthusiastically from the hedges for one day only, and on the Dyke the scratchy mimicry of my first sedge warbler for the site provided a welcome interruption to the ubiquitous babbling of common whitethroats. Swifts are now beginning to arrive en masse in the skies above Burwell and Reach, and the spectral presence of a barn owl enlivened an otherwise dull morning (both ornithologically and meteorologically) earlier in the week.

More unexpected, however, was the short-eared owl I found floating erratically over arable fields a stone's throw from the house yesterday. It eventually became tired of the elusiveness of the local skylarks and gave up its ineffectual flouncing about over the wheat, retiring to a perch on a nearby fence post to daydream about a nice fat vole, an expression of thunderous disgruntlement on its coupon.