I joined Matt Moreton on the trip down to Hampshire. As he had to drop his brother off at Luton airport at 4am he picked me up on the way back and so we were on site around 7am. We wandered around the sea wall and joined 4 other birders but nobody had had any sign of our target species.
I cheated a bit and scanned Twitter and using video and photos already posted I worked out roughly where we should be looking and picked out a white blob tucked in the long grass and weeds but despite the odd shuffle it refused to show.
Avocet
Redshank
Whilst waiting we had a scan around and I managed to pick up a few year ticks. 4 summer plumage Mediterranean Gulls were distant alongside 20+ Sandwich Tern. A few Avocet were dotted about with young and a Cuckoo was heard. 2 drake Eider were on the sea.
Just before 9am and when Matt was going to call it a day as he’d gone in just a short sleeved shirt and was freezing cold despite it being June the bird in question decided to finally move and as hoped it was one of the breeding pair of Roseate Tern. It clambered out of the weeds to the front of the island, had a poo and a quick fly about before walking back to the nest being on show for about 30 seconds! A tick for Matt and my 6th.
With it in the notebook we went back to the car to warm up and decided to head to Acres Down just up the road. As soon as we got out the car we heard a couple of singing Firecrest and another Cuckoo. From the viewpoint we both picked up a chunky bird fly up into a Silver Birch tree and Matt exclaimed Hawfinch! A nice male sat there just long enough to get good views in the bins but then flew off. We then noticed some birds mobbing something in the nearby trees so we headed in to investigate and had 2 Tawny Owl fly off ahead of us.
