Lade - warm, dry and sunny, NE 3-4 - A long weekend of fine weather with a keen wind off the bay made for chilly mornings and attracted hundreds of kite-surfers to the beach hereabouts. Due to the influx of holidaymakers we kept well away from Dungeness, concentrating on the local patch and, at last, enjoying a few moths in the garden trap and afternoon butterflies. Moth numbers remain low due to the cool nights but did include a smart and localised White Spot and a Rustic Shoulder-knot, a common enough species but one that I don`t get here very often.
Bird wise migration appears to have hit the buffers with a party of 65 summer plumage Sanderlings on the sands yesterday the only migrants of any note. Elsewhere, all the common warblers and Cuckoos are well into their breeding cycles alongside the resident wildfowl and grebes. A mid-morning raptor watch yielded five Buzzards, two Marsh Harriers and a Sparrowhawk thermalling over the airport fields and adjacent shingle ridges, while Sandwich and Common Terns, four Mediterranean Gulls and a Hobby flew over the garden during the course of the weekend. I cannot remember a Bank Holiday weekend when so few unusual birds were discovered across the Dungeness peninsula with just a flyover Serin and Bee-eater of any note, both of which were seen or heard by only a handful of observers.
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