New life on Brownsea

A few weeks ago a family trip to the tern colony on Brownsea Island was rudely interrupted by news of an Elegant Tern at a tern colony in Pagham Harbour. One of the reasons I had agreed to visit Brownsea was a secret hope that the Tern might appear there and that I would be the one to find it. Fast forward a couple of weeks and the Elegant Tern was indeed discovered at the Brownsea tern colony - not by me as I was in London on business, but by my former colleague Hamish Murray, doing his rounds for his new employer, the Dorset Wildlife Trust.

Sandwich Tern: a demanding youngster

This one was stood a couple of yards from where the Elegant Tern roosted on webcam

Sandwich Tern chick - this was taken 10 days ago so this bird will probably now be unrecognisable

Black-headed Gull chicks were on the islands and swimming on the lagoon

I don't think I have ever seen so many Common Tern chicks on Brownsea - there are 30 in this photo alone

Despite roosting overnight and being widely watched on the Brownsea webcam the Elegant Tern was only present in the colony for the first hours of daylight the following morning. I made a couple of visits to the island over the following days - it was a very long shot that the Tern might drop in again (and indeed it didn't) but I knew there would be plenty to see and photograph in any case.

The breeding terns can be very feisty - here a Common Tern takes a Little Egret to task

It's not all happy endings though - a Mediterranean Gull making off with a Black-headed Gull chick

That Med Gull again - butter wouldn't melt!

Common Tern bringing food back to the nest

Common Tern

Within the tern colony, both breeding species - Sandwich and Common - seemed to be doing incredibly well. The Sandwich Terns appear to have benefitted from fencing erected around their favoured islands preventing trampling by Sika Deer. The Common Terns prefer unfenced islands and they are also doing well - possibly because the pair of Yellow-legged Gulls which have bred in several recent years, and which plunder the tern chicks for their own offspring, don't appear to have nested this year.

The Terns were bringing a variety of food back to the nest - sandeels...

...Pipefish...

...and other small fish

Sandwich Tern

Refreshing to see so much new life doing well on the Island - and a great place for photographing the terns going about their business.

Sandwich Tern calling on approach to the colony

Sandwich Tern

Sandwich Tern

Sandwich Tern with a handsome catch

A distinct lack of wax

A small flock of Waxwings graced Poole on Thursday and Friday - so desirable they even persuaded Ian Ballam to part company with Lytchett Bay for a while. I headed around the harbour at the first opportunity on Saturday morning to look for them but despite checking out every supermarket car park within five square miles, they could not be found. After several hours I conceded defeat and cruised around some more familiar hotspots in Poole Park and Holes Bay.

A Kingfisher on the railings of the model boat pond at the partially drained Poole Park Lake relieved an otherwise grey day

Note the chipped bill tip - if it was a Blue Rock Thrush, people would say it was an escape :-)

Drake Goldeneye displaying

Female Goldeneye

Little Egret fishing in the shallows of Holes Bay - lovely plumes

The redhead Smew was a bit closer than on my last visit...

 

 

...but not as close as this Spotted Redshank

The outflow from the PC World drain into Holes Bay is a reliable site for them in winter

One was loosely associating with a large flock of Blackwits

Spotted Redshank

Birthday treats

It was my birthday recently - a stuttering but undefeated innings of 48, in case you were wondering. To celebrate almost half-a-century of under-achievement I cleared my professional decks, booked the day off work and did some birding around Poole Harbour. The children were at school and Claire was at work, affording me the luxury of neglecting the entire family to go looking for birds without guilt.

Lesser Yellowlegs at Lytchett Bay

Green-winged Teal, just leaving Lytchett Bay

Redhead Smew distantly in Holes Bay

The once fierce competition between Lytchett Bay and Swineham as Poole Harbour birding locations, a fire stoked in these pages on more than one occasion in the past, has tailed off somewhat in recent years. Lytchett has gone from strength to strength under sympathetic management by the RSPB, being diligently scoured by Top 10 Patchwork Challengers (impressive, though I still think Patchwork Challenge sounds like a needlecraft contest). Swineham has gone downhill under a less wildlife-friendly regime, being wilfully neglected by feckless regulars like yours truly. So much so that I felt barely a flicker of shame in shunning the latter for the former to go looking for Lytchett's two long-staying winter rarities from the Americas: a Lesser Yellowlegs and drake Green-winged Teal.

Dark-bellied Brent Geese at Baiter Park

Coot, Poole Park

Drake Goldeneye and Red-breaster Merganser were out in the middle of Poole Park lake

The Yellowlegs was easy enough, sitting out nicely with a Redshank for comparison, the only two medium-sized waders on one of the pools. The Teal required a bit more luck: it flew off just after I arrived, but not before a kindly soul had let me have a quick squint at it through his scope, hence the dodgy record shot above, hurriedly snapped as it pelted away. Around the corner a returning redhead Smew was in Holes Bay for its third winter, while Poole Park held a few photogenic fowl as always. I caught up with a trio of Great White Egrets slightly further afield at Longham Lakes before heading over on the Sandbanks ferry to complete a circuit of the Harbour.

A lone Black-tailed Godwit was on the shore of Poole Park lake

Little Egret, Poole Park lake

Three Great White Egrets at Longham Lakes

The last hour of daylight was spent at Studland, where the raucous calls of a couple of Sandwich Terns were a cruel reminder of just how far away is spring, and the even more raucous calls of the local Ring-necked Parakeets were an equally cruel reminder of just how far away and warm is their native India.

Ring-necked Parakeet, Studland

Ring-necked Parakeet, Studland

Sandwich Tern, Studland

I would say watching the sun go down at Studland completed the day, but that wasn't really the end of it as on arriving home there was a birthday present to play with: the US Capitol building from the Lego Architecture range. Quite repetitive assembling the orderly lines of neoclassical columns and other fiddly bits, but ridiculously satisfying, a pure indulgence, and, I am reliably informed by the teenager of the house, substantially more socially acceptable than making an Airfix model. The perfect gift for the middle-aged man-boy in your life.

The US Capitol Building courtesy of the Lego Architecture range - George Washington laid the first brick. If you listen carefully this model makes a strange whirring noise: the sound of a miniature George turning in his grave.

And finally...

This quick look back at December completes my series of posts reviewing 2016. Thanks for sticking with it - from the comments and texts urging me on recently, I got the impression that some of you didn't think I was going to make it. I could pretend it was all carefully planned to conclude as the sun sets for the last time on 2016, but that would be a lie. In fact, there was a point last week when I too thought I would never reach the end: it was, to borrow the sporting image of 2016, my Jonny Brownlee moment, and you, dear readers, were my Alistair, dragging me to the finishing line despite having much better things to do with your time.

2016 was of course a year of shock election results, famous folks' funerals and controversial rare birds. The evidence on climate change appeared stronger than ever but the peoples of the free world decided not to let the facts on this and several other matters of public debate get in the way of a good story, especially when it was being told by wealthy demagogues with their fingers crossed behind their backs. On those shock election results, I merely observe that just 27% of eligible Americans voted for Trump, and less than 38% of voting age Brits voted to leave the EU. Whatever you think of the results of both polls, this surely can't be taken as a sign that western democracy is in rude health. I recall fondly the ennobled billionaire tax-exile Lord Ashcroft tweeting after the US election and Brexit results that 'the elites' had lost touch with the people - how fortunate we are to have such down-to-earth meritocrats holding these damned elites to account.

Egrets: I've had a few - Dorset got in on the December Cattle Egret invasion, this bird being one of five with Little Egrets at Nottington

Corn Buntings were singing at Maiden Castle in the unseasonably warm weather of mid-December

 Corn Bunting, Maiden Castle

Much loved celebrities seemed to drop like flies in 2016 - or did they? My theory is that with a rising global population and the bar for celebrity being substantially lowered over time, there are just a larger number of them around to perish - so we'd better get used to more 'Sad death of tragic Brian off of Big Brother' type headlines in 2017. That said, there were some genuine mega-stars who left us during the year, and I had to smile at a recent suggestion on social media that Bowie had created a parallel universe and was in the process of populating it one by one with his own hand-picked choices. 

Marsh Harrier at Middlebere - from a visit early in the month



Little Egret, Middlebere: one of the few beneficiaries of our warming climate

Peregrine at Middlebere from the same visit

As for the controversial rarities, it started early in the year with the Dalmatian Pelican's tour of the south west, and ended with the Cotswolds Blue Rock Thrush. Establishing the provenance of a wide-ranging Lammergeier (not seen by me) and the wandering east coast Western Purple Swamphen (which I did see) was also potentially complicated by the influence of continental re-introduction schemes, even though neither were thought likely to be of captive stock.

A memorable December day saw me heading up to Derbyshire for a close encounter with a Dusky Thrush

Willow Tit at Carsington Water was a long overdue 'photo-tick' on the way back from the Dusky Thrush...

...as was the bonus of an Eastern Black Redstart in Tewkesbury on the way home - the first I had seen of this form and therefore my bird of the month for December

A quick attempt, then, to dish out some meaningless titles for 'whatsit of the year', an exercise fraught with danger not just due to fickle memory, but to the risk of implying that anything not mentioned wasn't fun or special - that would be nonsense, of course, but I'm afraid it's not going to stop me:

• Bird of the Year: it has to be the Siberian Accentor - the fact that it was part of a multiple occurrence of the species in Britain 'devalued' it for some, but for me it did the opposite, illustrating a genuine natural phenomenon and adding to its authenticity in a year which had more than its share of plastic controversy.
• Dorset Bird of the Year: Portland's Great Spotted Cuckoo was everything a rarity should be: big, beautiful and photogenic - and a county tick for me.
• Patch Bird of the Year: a very short shortlist due to a shameful lack of effort - but a self-found autumn Great White Egret claims the title, if stumbling across the birding equivalent of a Concorde in a haystack counts as 'self-found'.
• Twitch of the Year: it has to be the day trip with my son to St Mary's for the Cliff Swallow - though the Hebridean adventure for the Black-billed Cuckoo, the campervan sleepover for the Great Knot, the smash and grab for the Siberian Accentor and the Dusky Thrush/Eastern Black Redstart bonus ball day ran it a close second, third, fourth and fifth respectively. Not that I''m obsessed with lists, you understand.
• Photo of the Year: had to think about this one. But I love American waders, and I love photographing rare birds up close, so it's the second one from this series taken during an intimate encounter with the Hudsonian Whimbrel in Cornwall early in the year. 
• Dip of the year: I learnt long ago not to go too early with 'review of the year' posts and this year is no exception. I was looking forward to reporting 'no long distance dips' to speak of, when last week's Pembrokeshire trip failed to turn up the hoped for Masked Wagtail!
• The Donald Trump Award for services to climate chaos: having raised the spectre of climate change, I should reflect for a moment on my own carbon footprint: too much driving chasing all these birds around, obviously, but I managed more lift-sharing than usual in an A-rated car, and, apart from two short hops on crop sprayers to the Isles of Scilly, I never got on a proper plane or left the country by any other means in 2016. So not too bad relatively speaking, but certainly room for improvement. Mind you, given the state of sterling, not leaving the country may be less of a choice and more of a necessity in 2017!

The news in 2016 was full of talk of 'blue on blue' conflict, as leading Conservatives knocked lumps out of each other with their Polo hammers. This image of 'blue on blue' - the Blue Rock Thrush against the perfect sky of a cold December afternoon in Stow-on-the-Wold - presents, I feel, a more restful image, and one much less likely to have my Dad shouting at the telly. My photo of the month for December.

So, thanks to the various peregrinations chronicled in these pages in 2016, the number of birds I have seen in Britain according to the official list crept up from 452 at the start of the year to 458 by the end - not including the Swamphen, the Pelican and the Blue Rock Thrush, all suspended in listing purgatory pending consideration by the British Birds Rarities Committee. In statistical terms, therefore, whether or not 2016 can go down as a good or a very good year will in part depend on what these wise folk decide about the year's most controversial birds. The Swamphen should be fine, who knows with the other two. But in the final analysis, the numbers don't much matter: the birds, the butterflies and other interesting critters I saw this year took me to some inspiring places, in the company of some great people, and sometimes with just myself for company, in a search for natural beauty, solitude and fulfilment which undoubtedly kept me sane amid the madness of the modern world.

My thanks, then, to the wildlife, for still being there despite the best efforts of humanity to eradicate much of it; to my fellow travellers, for their companionship and for subjecting themselves to my incessant witterings en route; and to my family, for joining me when it was possible, and tolerating my absence without too much overt celebration when it wasn't. And finally thanks to all of you for reading. It appears that the review of the year by instalments idea was insufficient to avert one last mammoth post for the year, so my resolution for 2017 is a simple one: I'll knock that on the head next year. Assuming the fingers of President Trump's tiny hands haven't already punched in the nuclear codes by then of course. And on that cheerful note, may I wish you a Happy New Year!