Quatermass moment!

Lade - cold, cloudy, hazy, N 2 - 0700hrs - What an odd couple of hours on the local patch! Trudging across the shingle towards the lakes in grim weather conditions more akin to late autumn than early spring we flushed a couple of small flocks of grounded Meadow Pipits and a Wheatear. Looking south the power station was invisible, while the Dungeness fog horn was performing a fair impression  of a Bittern on helium.
  And then weird stuff happened. Whilst walking beside south lake checking out a Chiffchaff and Goldcrest in the gorse scrub a great bank of fog rolled in forcing down 50 Sand Martins and several Swallows over the water. A Song Thrush then dropped into the bushes (something of a rarity here) followed by a Snipe calling on high and then the whirring wing beats of Goldeneyes could be heard in the gloom; the long-staying seven fled east never to be seen again! As I said, weird stuff in a Quatermass-like (anyone reading this nonsense under 50, Google it!) atmosphere. More Sand Martins continued to drop in, but none stayed for long and once the fret dispersed so did the martins. Just when I thought that was that a Nightingale burst into song deep within the willow swamp, my earliest ever record. Birding continues to surprise even at my age.

                                Male Sparrowhawk on the `raptor mound`

  A late afternoon visit in humid, gloomy conditions didn't produce much over the lakes apart from a trickle of Swallows hurrying north. However, it was far more interesting at Kerton Road quarry where two Little Ringed Plovers were flying over the lake and our first Yellow Wagtail of spring passed overhead in the murk calling.
  When you watch a local patch on a regular basis there are some things you come to expect as a given, like the `raptor mound`. I always scan a small hillock of bare shingle out on the desert and expect a raptor to be sat there, most of the time of course its barren, though not so this afternoon as an adult male Sparrowhawk sat atop the stones surveying its territory. Over the years Kestrel and Sparrowhawk have been the mound`s regular sentinels, followed by Hobby, Merlin and Peregrine in that order and once a Red-footed Falcon, but best of all was a whopping great female Saker Falcon that regularly used the lookout over a decade ago.