Sunday August 5

A warm and mostly sunny morning with a very light southerly breeze.

Dave was able to join me and he soon spotted the first passerine migrant of the day, a Whinchat, near the Dragonfly Pools.

Whinchat

We continued to the pond in hedge, now bone dry, where we found a little flock of migrants. We followed them down the hedge and ended up with counts of 10 Common Whitethroats, five Lesser Whitethroats, several Chiffchaffs, a Willow Warbler, and a juvenile Spotted Flycatcher.

Willow Warbler

Spotted Flycatcher

Further evidence of migration came with a trickle of Swifts (nine in all) heading south.

The Flash field contained a lot of cattle. They were sheltering under an oak until they saw us and abandoned the shade for the thrill of getting as close as they could to us standing on the other side of the fence. To our amusement, the sheep in the field saw their chance and rushed to replace the cattle under the shady oak.

As for birds, we counted five Green Sandpipers, 37 Lapwings, a Snipe, and nine Teal. It was at this time we added a rather unsatisfactory year-tick. High up and off to the north we could hear a tern calling. We scanned the sky for at least a minute while the tern or terns called about a dozen more times. We couldn't see a thing. Given the time of year and the weather it was almost certainly a Common Tern as opposed to Arctic, but it would have been nice to actually see it.

Green Sandpiper

There were still plenty of insects about, more Small Heaths than recently, and still a few Common Blues and at least one Brown Argus. Dragonflies included the first Migrant Hawker of the year and at least 30 Small Red-eyed Damselflies.

A single Toad was sitting, covered in slime, watching the dragonflies with great interest.

Toad

By midday it was too hot to do anything further and we slouched off home.