Still place-keeping for now.
Normally October is the month for rares, but it seems the shift to November [and the clocks going back to where they should be] has had an effect.
It got to be a 'which do you try for?' yesterday, but with a Devon Tick versus a bird highly likely [as I thought] to get flushed off by hordes of dogs, that was also half the distance away, it really wasn't such a trial.
Unlike trying to get to and then find the darned thing.
A similar story on Friday with the Rosey Starling - allegedly at Whitford, certainly in a vast mass of regular-flavour Starlings roosting at Colyford Common/the Black Hole - where I could have just sat down and waited.. Ah well. Exercise is good for you, and all birding is worthwhile.
Reader, on my way back, having given up that the Pallid Harrier was anything other than a fly-through, and walking a different way back out of bloody-minded propriety, I flushed it. Got a lovely if very brief view of that spectacular arse [look at the photos; orange and white and dark and woooo] as it zipped off over the brow of Ringmoor Down [that's where it was all day; asleep in the long grass on a lee slope.].
Photo? I barely had time to get to get bins on it and start swearing.
Of interest,
The White-rumped Sand is still showing today, I understand. Despite being on a pool that is literally next to the car park with nothing to keep anyone off it. Go figure.
Friday. If I get my car fixed in time [Oh yes and that's another story]
Be Seeing You...
