White-rumped Sandpiper

We made a small detour to Lodmoor this morning to find the white-rumped sandpiper that was found there yesterday. It was associating with a small group of dunlins and was rather flighty,and became number 1413 on my life list. Also at Lodmoor were 8 greenshanks and about 30 Mediterranean gulls, along with large numbers of dunlins and common terns. It is the third species of American wader I have seen at Lodmoor now, after both species of dowitcher, and a pleasing, if a little drab, addition to my life list. White-rumped Sandpipers breed in northern Canada and Alaska and winter in South America, particularly Brazil, but are regular in Britain every autumn, and actually rather common in the Azores, with flocks of over 100 turning up in most years!

Cornwall and a great new garden bird

It has been a long time since I last posted, and since then I have finished my GCSEs, had my sixteenth birthday and enjoyed two weeks in Cornwall. Unlike last year, this year's trip to Cornwall brought no new birds, but I saw large numbers of choughs and literally tens of thousands of Manx shearwaters. The highlight was definitely the bottlenose dolphins, pods of which I saw four times during the trip, including one group of 30 at Pendeen Watch. 

Then, this morning, I had an incredible surprise. I first spotted what I thought to simply be a common buzzard, but decided to look at it through my binoculars any way, hoping that somehow it would turn out be something more rare, but certainly expecting nothing. Then, to my shock, I realised that the bird was no common buzzard, but a honey-buzzard! It is my first new British species seen from our garden in Hilfield ever, and certainly the rarest. Presumably it is the high pressure which caused it to drift over from wherever its breeding grounds are. What a bird to see from the garden!

Honey-buzzard, Hilfield, 14th July 2013

On top of that, I realised I had not made a blog post about my visit to Acres Down on the 17th June. Almost as soon as we arrived, a goshawk- my first in Britain and a strikingly large and broad species- flew over our heads and a short time later, we discovered a male redstart feeding its youngster, allowing superb views of this magnificent bird, combining to create a superb half an hour detour on the way back to Hilfield.