Twitchwell 10/9

The lure of three very good birds at Titchwell saw me on the road after the rugby had finished. The main target was the Buff breasted Sandpiper, a species which has eluded me so far, I walked straight past the Little Bittern watchers (or in that case it should be lookers)  headed to the Brackish marsh. Th BBS was very easy although it was about 250m from the hide. I watched the bird for about an hour as it was in full view for all the time and looked good through the scope. One thing that immediately struck me was the fact that I thought they were meant to look like Ruff! I assumed that because so many ruffs were miss id'd at Titchwell as BBS they would be tricky to separate, in reality they are very different as I'm sure most that are reading will already know. A nice bird and I'm glad to have finally caught up with one. My 6th British tick this year and it puts me on 405 species now.

After this I headed to the Little Bittern, I had frustrating brief and obscured views for about 20mins, enough to see all features of the bird but not all at the same time, I could have done with a box to stand on! With this in mind I decided to go along the boardwalk where I remembered their was once a gap to view the reeds, I struck lucky, I had my scope on the bird, the whole bird. Unfortunately there were only 2 small windows through the veg to view the bird but I managed to get a lot of people on to it, again I watched it in full view for about 20mins. After that the bird walked towards the crowd, unfortunately going along the nearside of the reeds. It did eventually show in the scrub right next to the path, but again you needed to be in the right place, and even then directions were tricky to give/follow. All in all I did have very good views and it was the first juv I have seen, the only other LB was the calling male at Titchwell a few years back, in a similar area. The new pools that have been created along the path look ideal for this species so hopefully there will be many more in the next few years.

Good to chat to all the usual suspects and always nice to visit the North coast, I dont need too much of an excuse.