Twit t woo

With all the shrikes on the East coast at the moment I thought I would give my favourite coastal strip a bash in search of my own. The area has given me greenish and a couple of yellow browed warblers in recent years so I thought I had a chance.

There was heavy rain and fog early in the day so I decided to finish some paperwork and headed out to the coast just after lunch. Although the rain had stopped, the fog was still bad and it felt more like early November rather than late May!

I was slightly strange walking along the scrubby coast path with very few birds for company. Any pishing produced the usual wrens, robins and dunnocks but in a 4km walk I only saw 5 chiffchaff, 5 whitethroat, 3 lesser whitethroat and 4 blackcaps in the way of summer migrants. There were lots of low feeding swallows and swifts but that was more due to the poor weather that anything else. I don’t think it is going to be a very good breeding season…

The highlight of the walk was the discovery of a tawny owl. I stopped by a nice bit of scrub and trees and started pishing. Nothing responded but I did see movement in the trees. I moved my position and there was a lovely tawny owl sitting there that had been attracted by the noise. It was probably the reason there were no passerines responding!! The only other thing on note was a showy singing male cuckoo.



 Fingers crossed things will improve soon!!