New Romney - warm, dry and sunny, SW2 - Stayed local this weekend with morning walkouts from home. Today`s wander around the Hope Lane loop was the most profitable with a female/juv type Redstart briefly seen flicking off a fence line and into a hedge by the old farmhouse, and my first here. Almost as surprising were two Tree Sparrows overhead calling by the stables where also a few Linnets, Goldfinches and Pied Wagtails noted. Needless to say water levels in the sewers and ditches are well down in this drought year but continue to harbour a few tardy Reed Warblers and Buntings and a single Little Egret. The bone-dry stubble fields were devoid of birds apart from corvids, Woodpigeons, Stock Doves and the occasional Yellow Wagtail over, while the hedgerows along the lane attracted a couple of Blackcaps, Willow Warblers and a Lesser Whitethroat, plus two Hummingbird Hawk-moths and several Common Darters. The garden moth trap hasn`t thrown up any surprises of late, although a `brown` Yellow Shell, one of the most variable of macros, had me struggling for a while.
I stopped to chat with a ploughman who`d just finished converting a stubble field by the bridge into a surface suitable for sowing grass seed for the local turf company. The final process involves a series of heavy rollers being towed behind a tractor flattening the field into a billiard-table finish complete with tiny furrows to accept the seed from the hoppers, all of which was completed in one super-efficient pass. He said now all that was needed was rain within the next ten days to germinate the seeds, otherwise water sprinklers would have to be brought in. I noticed that the seed furrows were left mostly uncovered and asked (rhetorically) whether this would cause a problem from seed-eating birds? "What birds, there ain`t none" he retorted. It was a fair comment, I suppose...
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