Romney Salts - warm, dry and sunny, SW 2 - Cracking late autumn weather, and ideal for a walkout from home across the Salts with Ted, one of his favourites. Considering the lateness of the season the main event avian wise was a notable passage of hirundines with 10 Swallows and four House Martins pausing to feed on flying insects over the dung heap, plus 30 more Swallows across an adjacent rape-seed field. Otherwise it was fairly uneventful with the scrub around the dung heap and arable lands either side of the green lane to Lade north attracting at least 30 Reed Buntings, 20 Goldfinches, 10 Robins and 10 Chaffinches, along with a scattering of Meadow Pipits, Pied Wagtails and Skylarks, five Stonechats, four Yellowhammers, two Corn Buntings, two Kestrels and a Common Buzzard; while Ted flushed a dozen Red-legged Partridges and two Common Snipe from the corner of a stubble field. The warm sunshine encouraged a few Red Admirals and Migrant Hawkers onto the wing in various sun traps, and a Hummingbird Hawk-moth was on the garden salvia this afternoon.
Elsewhere since my last post our Ted walks have taken us to Dungeness foreshore for two very poor seawatches; two visits to Lade where there was little of note apart from a flyover Lapland Bunting last Friday and hardly any wildfowl; and St Mary`s Bay where a trickle of common passage migrants passed overhead and a male Kestrel flew in off the sea and settled atop a bush. Although most of our Kestrels are resident, here in the south-east corner of England we sometimes receive autumnal migrants from the near continent and this may have been one such bird as it appeared to be very weary and reluctant to fly, despite people walking nearby.
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