Unsatisfactory Savi's

After seeing that a Savi's Warbler and Great Reed Warbler had both come up on the bird news yesterday in Gwent and Somerset, I decided to take a trip down there today to twitch both.  The weather forecast was cloudy but when I started off this morning it was also quite windy and this remained so, right through into Wales and around the reed beds at Newland Wetland Centre.  This made it virtually impossible to see any warblers in the reed bed as they were all hunkering down.

After a 3 hour wait, despite a pleasant surprise of bumping into a friend of mine, I gave up and went back to my car for lunch and a cup of coffee.  Just as I was thinking of leaving, news came up that the bird was intermittingly singing again and so I rushed back to the spot where other birders were gathered.  As per usual the comments were "you should of have been here 5 minutes ago, we had great flight views and it was showing well".  Fortunately, just as that moment the bird reeled for a few seconds to the left in front of me and as I moved left I caught a 10 second glimpse of it as it stopped reeling and then moved back down the reed stem.  After waiting for another 15 minutes, the bird reeled several more times but did not show, so I decided to depart.  As it was still very windy, I decided to give the Great Reed Warbler a miss and travelled back home instead.

At least I managed to see one of the birds on offer today, albeit it an unsatisfactory sighting but a least a sighting of a bird that eluded me in Spain.