Whiskered Tern at Rockland

Yesterday afternoon I recieved a phone call in the office letting us know that an adult whiskered tern was at Rockland...Great!! I phoned it into RBA straight away so that people could sus it out asap. I then was faced with two problems, firstly I still had an hour and a half to work and secondly I had no car!! Luckily Ian was going to have a look so I managed to get a lift, just before that a message confirmed that it was one and it was still there...lift accepted!

On entering the hide a lot of the usual local people were present and enjoying relatively distant views of the tern. We watched it for about 45mins, in which time it was busy feeding and doing laps of the broad, mostly distant but it did come close on a few occasions, when it came close I was mainly using binoculars rather than camera (hence the quality of shots...as always!!)

It was repoted to fly strongly North West at 7.30ish  so I'm guessing its now gone, hopefully it'l get picked up somewhere else locally, or go to where most WT's go in Norfolk- Hickling!

Spring has well and truly arrived!

Since my last post, the floodgates have really opened and the fen looks, feels and sounds like its in full bloom (or should that be boom?!)

The migrants started with a Sand Martin on the 23rd March quickly followed by the blackcaps and Willow warblers. Sedge warbler was a bit late this year, although I thought I had heard brief snatches of song early on 28/3, I didnt tick it until 2/4.
One of the highlights so far was a fine male Ring ouzel along the riverbank on one of my rent a warden walks, this was followed by my first little gull for the fen, which lingered for at least 5 days! Although possibly the rarest bird I will find this year was a fine mixed singing Willow/Chiff, this was my first proper mixed singing bird which gave a very intriguing song comprised of a buzzy speeded up chiff-chaff chiff-chaff x6 follwed by a standard willow warbler song, a brief look at the bird showed it to be a willow.
Other than that it has been more routine, but still good quality stuff, like a pair of Garganey, pair of Cranes (which I house ticked yesterday!). The first cuckoo sung on 15/4 as did my first reed warbler. A very pleasant few weeks, I'm just in need of a decent find now to get my points up on PWC, although self finding the cranes come in from distance last week helped a bit! (up to 124 species for Strumpshaw, Buckenham and Cantley now, although I'm running out of expected species now!)