A Hobby Weekend

A trip to Surrey this weekend gave me the excuse to drag my Birder's wife to Otmoor to look for Turtle Doves on the way down.  Unfortunately despite extensive searching and hearing them purring away we just could locate them grrrrr.

European Roller

An hour after arriving in Farnham and having a lovely lunch with my Birder's wife and her Godmother, I happened to glance at my phone to catch up on the bird news and noticed that a Roller was showing just 5 miles away.  I hastily excused myself and whizzed over to Broxhead Common and after a 15 minute wait was soon watching the bird as it chilled out on a dead tree stump.  The Roller is such an iconic bird to me as I remember looking at photos of them in a colourful book of birds and Britain and Europe that I had and in fact still do have.  As soon as I saw the photo of a Roller it went on my wanted list along with Beeeater and Hoopoe.  Well, finally, 38 years later I have seen both my first Beeeaters (in Rome) and my first Roller in the same year.  After also seeing a Hoopoe in Rome last month, I just need Golden Oriole to make a truly exotic set of birds seen so far this year.

Hobby

The following morning I made my excuses again to my Birder's wife and her Godmother murmuring something along the lines of "I am just allowing you to enjoy girly chats with each other" and drove down to Selsey Bill.  Selsey Bill is supposed to be a good seawatching point and usually is but not this spring and after a 3 hour watch, we only managed a Great Northern Diver, plenty of Common Scoter, Little Terns, a few Gannets and one Arctic Skua.  The regulars who go down there are a jovial and friendly bunch - maybe some Warwickshire Birders could learn a few lessons from them in the art of not being grumpy.  I was given a tip off of a Turtle Dove at North Wall Pagham harbour by one of them and after a long walk from the RSPB car park heard the bird several times but again could not locate it, double grrrrrr.  On the way back to Farnham I took a detour to Thursley Common and was rewarded with great views of Hobby hawking (must have been about 5+ of them).

After fond farewells this morning we made our way home via Otmoor and had great views of Hobby (at least 5 of them) but again could locate any Turtle Dove, triple grrrrr.