Up close and personal

One of my Xmas presents from Judith was a "meerkat experience", one of those experiences you get in Boots and Smiths in boxes - fast cars, ballooning, pampering days etc. This was the opportunity to interact with some iconic small furry beasts. I booked it at a place in the middle of nowhere in the Fens, near Ely. It's called The Animal Experience (www.animalexperience.org).The website looked "interesting" and I had no idea really what to expect when we got there.
On arrival it looked interesting. A carpark and a few wooden huts. Once we got in though it was really good. It's a small operation run by one extended family and they have a variety of creatures on site you can meet - snakes, coatis, spiders, lizards and of course the meerkats.

We were given 10 minutes to look around and then taken into to meet the stars of the show. Lee greeted us and showed us around. There were 3 in our cabin (it was a log cabin converted into a meerkat enclosure), a female and a mother and youngster. Lee, who was showing us around sat with us for about an hour whilst we were with them and was very educational. As you can see from the photos we just sat on the floor or on a seat and the meerkats crawled all over us! The vocalisations were amazing - you could immediately hear different ones for food or fun or calling each other.

After a very enjoyable hour with our new friends the meerkats, and really recommended.
On the way back, we stopped off near Royston for another bit of up close and personal - this time playing with a macro lens and some insects on flowers. It was windy and there wasn't that much around, but we did manage to get a few decent images, mainly of bees and hoverflies.

Get knotted!

It's really starting to get quiet now. With a big low pressure system over the country there is nothing coming across from the continent and the Yanks aren't arriving either. So, when two day ago, there was a mega alert in Norfolk it got not just me but most of the twitching community well, twitching.
The bird in question was a great knot, an Asiatic cousin of our commoner red knot and a very rare bird. There have only been 4 previous records and one of those was nicknamed the great dot as it only showed at massive distance on a mud flat and most observers could barely recognise it as a bird let alone a great knot!
Day 1 was Wednesday when it was first sighted at Titchwell on the fresh marsh then the beach causing a localised migration of birders to the coast for it. Thursday and it was still there, commuting between marsh and beach in the company of the local flock of red knot. Amusingly, Boris Johnson was in Norfolk on the same day and apparently the great knot attracted larger crowds!
So, Friday was a 5am leave the house and a blast down to Titchwell. By the time I got to the car park at 7.15 it was already pretty full, probably 40 or so cars. I pulled in at the same time as another birder, Mike, who lived locally and who had dipped on Thursday so the two of us yomped down to the beach together and spend a pleasant morning together. If you know Titchwell, we walked down the bank to the beach and turned right for about half a mile to get to a group of around 100 birders.
Everyone was looking at a flock of waders, mainly red knot, about a hundred yards or more away on the edge of the surf.

You can immediately see the challenge - somewhere in there is one bird, roughly the same size and shape as the others which you need to find. The bird we were looking for is closer in appearance to a turnstone, with a reddish mottled back and white underside, and boldly marked face - but where is it?
Over probably an hour we scanned the flock. One bird looked good but we could only see it partially, and at extreme distance. The tide was also going out so every 10 minutes or so the flock took off and moved out with us following them at a suitable distance.

Eventually the flock though started to disperse as feeding grounds were exposed. This also meant the birders dispersed to check all the different sub-flocks. Eventually the bird was tracked down and we all clustered together as it moved along the tide line.

These two give a good impression of what we are seeing. There is one great knot and a lot of commoner red knot. Hopefully you can see the difference. The great knot is larger,  but only just so and hard to tell at distance. What stands out though is the plumage - the dark chest band, the red mottled back, the longer beak. Once you got your eye in even though it moved you could get back onto it relatively easily, well with the help of many other birders anyway!
For about an hour or so we all followed it up and down the beach as it fed on the rocks as they appeared with the falling tide. Sometimes it got a bit closer, most of the time it was a long way off. The photo below, as with all the others, is with a 500mm lens, 2x converted and heavily cropped! It's on the left of the flock, 4 birds in.

The series below hopefully gives you a better idea of the jizz of the bird. Easily mistaken for a turnstone, it was feeding happily with it's plainer cousins, but that mottled almost chestnut back, bright white rump and head pattern made it stand out.

Apologies for the background noise, but finally this short video shows you what we were all getting excited about - a great bird in many ways.

Great knot feeding at Titchwell

About 11.30 the early starters began to disperse back to the car park, although there was a good numbers of new arrivers as well. As a post script, it flew off about an hour after this and was not seen again on Friday, so I may have been a very lucky boy. Certainly the drive back was not a chore. Only need 5 more lifers now to get 350 - would be nice to get that by end of this year as a stretch target!!

Warbling in the marsh

We're heading towards the Summer doldrums as far as birding is concerned, but there are a few nice birds still to be found. One which I have dipped on twice is the marsh warbler (well, dipped once and saw another one which the powers that be decided wasn't kosher!). This is an  Acrocephalus warbler, closely related to our more common reed warbler. It looks VERY similar and is mainly only told apart by it's song, more of which later.
Anyway, I got up early and headed off to Suffolk to a new reserve for me, Hen Reed bed. It's sort of past Minsmere by about 10 miles on the coast and on first sight was just another marshy, reedy, tidal reserve. A walk of about 15 minutes along a river bank got me to a bend in the path by a hide. Already you could see a number of birds flying around in the reeds including this rather smart sedge warbler.

 From a weedy ditch though was coming a very loud song, scratchy and very varied. By walking round the ditch I could also see the bird sitting up on the reeds, which itself is unusual as they normally skulk.

On closer inspection it is an archetypal lbj - little or nothing stands out by way of plumage.

This last photo probably gives you all you need to know - it looks like a reed warbler, dark brown above, lighter below. There are subtle differences to do with length of primary projections but they overlap. The main thing is the song, which you can compare in the two clips below.

Video of marsh warbler

This first one is the marsh warbler. The song is very varied and unstructured with a mix of whistles, flutes and trills. They are notorious mimics and you can sometimes hear other birds calls mixed in.

Video of reed warbler


This second one is a "classic" reed warbler. Theres a lot of wind noise but you should be able to hear that the song is simpler and more predictable with repeated phrasing.

I spent about 30 minutes listening to it sing away with a steady stream of other birders coming and going, all happy and quite surprised about how easy it was to see.
With nothing else rare around I decided to spend the rest of my time at Dunwich heath. This is right next to Minsmere, which I spurned partly because Springwatch was there so I presumed they would be busy packing their gear up. I also wanted to try and see the Dartford warblers which are normally quite showy there. Some years ago their population was very low in the UK but with a combination  of habitat management and mild winters they are much more numerous in the south and east now. This turned out to be just the case, as about 20 photographers attested to. On each path there seemed to be a small group watching the heather! So, I found my little patch and waited. Initially all I could see were smart stonechats flitting around.

Gradually though I could hear the male Dartford's singing and occasionally see a bird flit across the heather. Finally, one decided to settle in a tree near me, then fly down to the heather nearby.

 It was a really smart male.

It proved to be quite confiding and I followed it across the heath where it was feeding vigorously and occasionally sitting up on a bush.

A nice day all-round. One lifer plus some of the best Dartford views I've had in a long time.