Cool, dry and sunny, light airs - It`s been a mixed week of weather to say the least for our daily Ted walks around New Romney. A few more winter thrushes have been noted, mostly Fieldfares, and the flooded turf fields continue to attract hundreds of Black-headed, Common and Med Gulls along with a few Little Egrets, Grey Herons, Reed Buntings and Stonechats along the sewer margins. Yesterday afternoon, in a break in the rain, we walked Romney Salts looking for owls at the back of the airport, of which there was no sign, but Ted did flush a Lapland Bunting from the main track which conveniently called as it flew off; how many others were out in the stubble fields is anyone`s guess. While small numbers of Skylarks, Meadow Pipits, Blackbirds and Song Thrushes were noted along the way, the main bird bio-mass spectacle comprised flocks of over 1,000 Feral Pigeons, 500 Woodpigeons, 100 Stock Doves, 100 corvids and 500 gulls.
Visits to the bird reserve this week have yielded egrets everywhere with round 30 Cattle Egrets scattered amongst the sheep folds along the Lydd Road and opposite the golf club, and plenty of Little and Great White Egrets and the four Glossy Ibises, mostly in the heavily flooded Boulderwall fields. A guided walk on Tuesday for RSPB, in heavy rain, was pretty much a washout apart from an adult Little Gull and a very elusive Slavonian Grebe on Burrowes, where a Great Northern Diver also turned up later in the day and was still there today. A couple of visits to Dungeness to scan the sea were notable for further views of the adult Sabine`s Gull and a light passage of Brent Geese from the hide on Monday. A check of Scotney on Wednesday revealed the usual couple of thousand feral geese, Lapwings and Golden Plovers on the front sward. Late this afternoon we headed down to Littlestone golf links where at least three Short-eared Owls have taken up residence, with one showing reasonably well quartering the rough grassland just before sunset.
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