Well after yesterday's successful trip to Medmerry, took it a bit easy today with a walk up the Downs, a circular walk east from the Bostal Road near Sompting. Both my regular readers will have noticed that Margie has left me to do all the Birding on my own lately😢, it's tough but I grind on through, it doesn't do itself you know,😁( the usual excuses, housework, work, cooking etc😏) however she deigned to come today!! We didn't arrive until 10am, not blaming anyone but it weren't me in the shower for hours!!😆 Lovely sunshine, blue skies and a bit of a breeze greeted our arrival. The walk was fairly quiet although the views are stunning all around, there were 9 Stonechats on one fence line. Big flock of Linnets, a few small groups of Meadow Pipits and lots of Skylarks flying about, as yesterday, there was a constant stream of Housemartins and Swallows, nothing posing very well though except a couple of Pied Wagtails and the Stonechats!
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| Stonechat |
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| Pied Wagtail |
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| Stonechat |
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| Silver Seas |
Margie took some landscape stuff below, catching the big skies really well!!
At the turning point, we had an excellent encounter with a very patient Corn Bunting, had seen a couple of flyovers but this one sat nicely!!
Great views of one of my favourite birds! We decided rather than go all the way round, that we would go over the top, following the path through a large stubble field, we had seen plenty of Skylarks flying around the field, so we designed a cunning plan, to walk slowly across the field getting stunning views and pics of the Larks. Failed miserably, even in full ninja mode couldn't get close, couldn't even see them on the ground, they just flew up around us and I made my usual rubbish attempts at pics, a Sparrowhawk zoomed through as well!
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| The stubble field! |
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| Sparrowhawk |
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| Sparrowhawk |
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| Skylark |
We headed down the hill, some deceptively peaceful looking cows were nonchalantly mooching about at the far side when, stampede!!!! If it hadn't been for the sturdy barbwire fence between us I could have been squished!!
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| Charge!!!!!! |
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| I christened this one scarface, as it's more scary than white line face!! |
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| Look at the horns on that!! |
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| These are even bigger!! |
Recovering from the trauma we headed back to the car, there had been several Kestrels knocking about one finally came close enough for a few pics!
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| Kestrel |
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| Margie's crack at the Kestrel |
We had another go at the Stonechats and Margie found some flowers, we saw a few Butterflies, including a Wall, a couple of Whites and a Red Admiral though we didn't get any pics of em! The Kestrels put up the flock of Linnets, but was distant so pics not great.
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| Stonechat |
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| Linnets |
Very nice walk, great to be out and about in nice weather!! Apart from the Kestrels and the fly through Sprawk there were surprisingly few Raptors considering the conditions, think we saw 3 or 4 Buzzards at extreme distance I was expecting more!!!
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