It's been a long time coming

17th August - Osprey is one of my bogey birds on patch, I always seem to arrive just after or just before one has flown through.  You need a bit of luck with this species, as they almost never linger and you just have to be there when they fly over.  This morning I had been on site for about 5 minutes, viewing from the western bank, when I saw a large bird flying towards the lake from the east.  A quick look through my bins confirmed that it was an Osprey - get in!! I watched it flying closer and saw it looking down at the lake, probably trying to spy a fish.  It veered slightly southwards over the lake and then continued westwards.  It had put all the birds on the spit up in the air and the large gulls were half heartedly chasing it on.  I attempted to catch a record shot with my point and shoot, which suffers with a lack of zoom, so the shots below are quite heavily cropped, the first one massively so, hence the pixilation.

Massive crop

Approaching west bank being followed by a LBBG

 

Further crop of above photo

Disappearing westwards

A few minutes later a Green Sandpiper flew over calling and later still, a Common Sand flew around the lake looking for somewhere to land, though I don't know whether it did or not.  The spit is suffering with overgrown vegetation at the moment, as the gravel company will not let any of the usual volunteers out to mow it and keep it in check due to Elfin Safety.  Consequently, the usual gulls, geese and Lapwings have all been forced to the edges which gives little space for any passing waders to utilise.  I think that this has definitely had a detrimental effect on wader passage recently, with waders either stopping for a few minutes and being chased off, or more often, just flying straight over.

Other snippets from the past week were 2 Green Sands early on Thursday morning before a Lapwing took a dislike to them and chased them off and a small passage of warblers on Friday morning including 2 Sedge Warblers in the southern reed bed and a Willow Warbler and Whitethroat in the railway hedge.  Yesterday afternoon, I visited Pump Lane for the first time in a while and found a couple of Wheatear in the horse paddocks and also a Clouded Yellow in the field by the vineyard.