Birding Braunie

At the moment, every week in the Lee Valley Park brings exciting change. Last week you wouldn’t have heard the Nightingales or Cuckoos, you wouldn’t have seen Orange-tip butterflies, Sedge Warblers or Moorhens feeding their chicks and this week you could. The best way to experience all this change is to get up early I’m afraid. I arranged to meet my colleague and friend Brenda at 7am in order for us to have a good long walk around some of the park before we opened up the Bittern Information Point which we man as volunteers. It was a cool yet sunny start and we were hit by the chorus of birdsong as we made our way along Walton’s Walk towards Hooks Marsh. This choir was led by the distinct song of the Blackcap, one of the first of the warbler migrants to reach our shores for the summer. Blackcap in full song We were lucky with this chap as Blackcaps do like to annoy you as they sing from under the leaf cover of trees and then flicking to another point and repeating the game.

Another anxious and nail-biting week where working for a living became quite annoying as various birds of interest kept popping up on the various bird news sites I view, hourly. Eventually however, Saturday arrived like it always does and the warm sunny weather of the working work dissipated into a largely cold south-westerly wind, nasty black clouds and some whiplash-like rain showers. How nice. My plan had been to go to Rainham Marshes, specifically to the Cordite store area to experiment with the macro lens I have use of at the moment on a plethora of bum-biters and butterflies but the cold wind and the rain put paid to that. Of course the plan had also been to see if either the Spoonbill and Garganey pair were still there as well as building on the Wildgoose Chasers meagre year list. And with spring sort of here, I first went looking for migrants along the Thames path. There were no signs of any Wheatears or even Ring Ouzels but I could hear a Sedge Warbler and there were a lot