Navigation

Monday, May 18, 2009

Birding - 18/05/09

With Mrs B at work and Numbers 1 & 2 shopping with the in-laws, it left me and Number 3 with the weekly shop and pilgrimage to Sandön/Rönnen. En route two sizeable flocks of barnacle geese crossed the road heading NE. Sandön was fairly quiet with knot (3), little gull (2) and grey plover (2) as the highlights.

Things got more interesting at Rönnen however. We jammed in nicely on a marsh sandpiper twitch and had great views. Finding a nice summer-plumage broad-billed sandpiper however took somewhat longer; lots of rocks and dunlin were involved and then great range came into play and I fear I may have damaged my relationship with Number 3. I could tell things were bad when she started eating mussel shells. Other birds here included little stint (6), Temminck's stint (16+), curlew sandpiper (5) and a superb red morph female cuckoo.

Spent the remainder of the afternoon in the garden hoping for barnacle geese or some of yesterday's honey buzzards. There was a big movement of honey buzzards yesterday which I completely over-looked, not for the first time I found myself wishing that HB's had a loud nasal "ka-karr...ka-karr" migration call. The day ended with an evening session together with Mrs B down at Eskilstorps pools. En route I screeched to a halt as a honey buzzard overtook us heading east. In the next couple of minutes another five came through on the same track and then it was over. Result.

The pools had some migration going on over it with 60 eider east and another good flock of barnacle geese, otherwise things were quiet enough. The grasshopper warbler reeled away and a wood sandpiper brightened the place up. Drove back home through a spectacular localised electric storm that dumped a lot of rain very quickly.

No comments:

Post a Comment