Where have all the migrants gone?

 Dungeness - cold and sunny, NE 3 - That`s a rhetorical question as it`s pretty obvious why the peninsula appears to be largely bereft of passage migrants so far this month; the main culprit being the weather with a persistent and cold northerly airflow blocking birds coming up from the continent. Clear and frosty nights don`t help matters as it just encourages migrants to overshoot us and head inland. However, that said it has been an above average spring for Willow Warblers and Sand Martins, certainly on my local patch at Lade, but otherwise numbers of other migrants have been low. Seawatching was always going to be poor in northerlies, but most of the regulars cannot remember it being this bad with hardly any ducks and waders through, so far; although, as you`d expect Cap-Griz-Nez over the Channel have had one or two decent days (checkout: www.trektellen.nl ). Still, the `business end` of spring migration is still to come (late April/early May) and we can only hope for a southerly airflow to deliver a host of skuas, divers, waders and terns on the sea and some tasty overshooting exotics from the south on the land.

                                          Wheatears, Dungeness

To prove a point, for a change this morning we opted for a circuit of Dungeness, so across the Desert, through the Trapping Area and around Long Pits. Migrants included a sprinkling of Blackcaps, Chiffchaffs, and Whitethroats, four Swallows, two Willow Warblers, a Reed Warbler and five Wheatears, plus regulars such as Linnet, Green Woodpecker, Cetti`s Warbler, Meadow Pipit, Stonechat, Skylark and Kestrel. This afternoon a tour of the local patch delivered a trickle of Sand Martins and Swallows over south lake but little else in the cold wind.

On the way back to the car park we paid homage to the re-vamped war memorial commemorating the two Polish fighter pilots who were shot down off Dungeness on 16th April 1941. Both pilots were members of the legendary 303 Polish Squadron based at RAF Northolt. It is sobering to read how young both men were when they died; we truly are the lucky generation not to have been involved in the horrors of war.