Missed list

Lade - cold, heavy rain, ne 7 - A shocker of a day down here; infact it was one of the worst in the 12 years we've lived here with gale force north-easterlies and torrential rain bringing down garden fences, ripping tiles off the cottage roof and flooding the garage - and it wasn't even a named storm!!
The weather conditions were so bad that we were confined to barracks for most of the day as the wind and rain lashed the peninsula.
  However, it did mean that I could catch up on some paperwork and in an idle moment check out the Plovers bird list for 2017. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I`m not much of twitcher (did a fair bit of that back in the 80`s and 90`), but we do keep a running total of birds seen around Dungeness and across the Romney Marsh during our outings. We normally average about 220 species (228 was out best tally five years ago), although this year we are running low at 214, although with three weeks remaining there`s still the chance of a few more.
  However, the stand out bird on the `missed list` this year is Grey Partridge. I`ve checked all their former haunts and drawn blanks, so unless any are artificially introduced for so called `sporting purposes` they are as good as extinct down here. Several summer visitors eluded us this year including Black-winged Stilt, Roseate Tern, Wood Warbler, Bee-eater, but to be fair they were few and far between, as were sightings of seabirds such as Shag, Little Auk, Sabine`s Gull and that ace rarity, Puffin. Other passage migrants missed were Stone Curlew, Radde`s Warbler, Crossbill and despite much autumn viz migging, Hawfinch...
  There, were of course, one or two goodies during 2017 and plenty of memorable days, all of which will be included in a forthcoming end of year review.