Autumn Passage Underway!

One of the great joys and frustrations of birding is that every year is different! Come August, I am out looking for autumn migrants - flycatchers, warblers, redstarts and chats - walking the fields, scanning the hedgerows and checking the local gravel pits for waders too.  I check dates from previous years when I discovered birds and the frustration grows if those dates pass and still no birds!

This August has proved fairly quiet so far with a trickle of expected waders - Greenshank, Ringed Plover and Dunlin - and, while foraging tit flocks have grown, nothing out of the ordinary has revealed itself.  I have had to content myself instead with the usual fayre of Willow Warblers, Chiffchaffs, Lesser and Common Whitethroats, Blackcaps and Garden Warblers.  Of course, watching these flocks is enjoyable and I recently watched group of perhaps a hundred birds pushed this way and that through the trees by a stealthy Sparrowhawk.

A female Blackcap - a bird very likely to be encountered in any foraging flock

Half the fun is searching but truth be told the other half is more fun - finding! Finally on 20th August a little bird flew up in front of me and landed atop a tall tree.  On initial impression I was convinced it was a Whinchat but it remained silhouetted against the bright sky.  Knowing their preference for perching lower down on prominent scrub I waited.  Suddenly it had vanished from the treetop and after a hasty scan, there it sat, right in front of me, on a tall thistle as they are wont to do.

Whinchat

While not rare at all by most people's standards, this little bird, at least for me, constituted the first 'proper' autumn discovery and my first for the year anywhere in the UK.  I'm sure there'll be plenty more this autumn but for the moment my 'birding battery' was recharged!

Thankfully I didn't have to wait long for the next boost as the headline photo suggests.  A call yesterday from a local friend alerted me to his discovery of a Pied Flycatcher along the River Ver near his house.  This is a truly good migrant bird to catch up with and one that I don't always see every year so without hesitation I was there, bins in hand, camera at the ready!

Thankfully the bird gave great and prolonged views as it sallied for insects and grubs low down in the scrub by the river.  Many of my previous encounters with these birds have been all too brief as they are masters of disappearing and, when active, can flit fast and furiously within the canopy, denying good views.  This one, however, gave some of the best view I've had to date and took my "Five Miles From Home" year list to 141.