Birding Braunie

September 1st and the early morning darkness greets me as I step out into the autumnal chill.What summer we had is disappearing fast. And that is great news. Late summer in the world of birding can be a little quiet and everyone has an impatient eye on the calendar and autumn can’t come quickly enough. So today I had high hopes of a good days birding and a trip down to Dungeness felt like a good plan and if nothing else, it should clear the hangover I felt from the night before. Dungeness. Note the complete lack of anything avian in this picture. Funny old place Dungeness. Not just for the dilapidated shacks, perculiar hand-scripted offers for lugworm and shellfish propped up against rusted lumps of marine machinery but the fact that there are quite often days when there are no birds on the land apart from the odd woodpigeon or scruffy magpie. So it can be a bit of a gamble. Overnight rain is no bad thing and if the wind is coming off the sea from a south westerly direction, seaw...

You can’t blame rarities when they’re not where they’re supposed to be. After all, they aren’t supposed to be there anyway. Every now and then, I choose to visit a place a rare bird has been seen. In this case, it was a Greenish Warbler at Northward Hill in Kent. It had turned up only yesterday and I was hopeful that it would be around for a day or two. A few of spent a couple hours searching for the Asian Houdini but to no avail. I did find a Nightingale which gave brief views and green and Great Spotted Warblers kept us entertained. I left hoping it wouldn’t reappear and headed off to Elmley Marshes to get over it. This was probably a mistake as Elmley is a vast tract of land with very little cover. With the sun already beating down at a steady 26ºc I was going to be toast. I nearly ran over a Red-legged Partridge as I drove through the entrance gates so that was a new bird for the year. All along the 2 mile track to the reserve there were Lapwings, Yellow Wagtails, Skylarks an...