My first Wheatear of the Spring

 Sunday 20th March

Twice a year in March and November Gareth and I spend a morning at an antique bottle show held annually in Alton in Hampshire. This is an opportunity to rummage through the many stalls at the show in the hope of adding to our collection of antique bottles from Sussex towns and also meet other collectors. Today was moderately successful with two new stoneware ginger beer bottles from Lewes and Seaford added to the collection.   

Having finished at Alton, our next stop was Thorney Island where a Black Brant (the N American race of Brent Goose) had been seen a few days ago. Although it was high tide, we could only find a handful of Brents at Eames Farm, all distant and impossible to scrutinise closely due to the heat haze. We quickly gave it up as a bad job and decided instead to go and have a look for the pair of Red-crested Pochard at Chichester Gravel Pits which according to BirdGuides had relocated from Ivy Lake (where they’d been for the last two days) to Runcton Lake. This is a bird which is widely kept in captivity and has a large feral population in parts of the UK which makes it very difficult to decide whether the occasional birds that turn up in Sussex are wild or not. We quickly located the pair from the footpath along the west side of the lake and, despite being of potentially suspect origin, I had to admit that they did look very smart in the spring sunshine. 



Rather than head home, we decided to stay out birding and try the east side of nearby Pagham Harbour. Here we found the Breech Pool predictably full of water with no muddy margins and few birds bar a handful of Teal and a couple of Little Grebes. A pair of Grey Herons was nesting building in Owl Copse but there was no sign of any egrets back in their nesting colony yet. Up to 6 Glossy Ibises have been roosting in Owl Copse in recent weeks but being mid rather than late afternoon (when the birds come into roost) we were perhaps fortunate to see two Ibises that flew over our heads and continued north out of sight towards Mundham. In the fields east of Marsh Farm were 11 rather skittish Cattle Egrets, a recent colonist at Pagham, how long before Glossy Ibis follows suit and starts breeding here? 

As we were walking back to the car, Gareth got a 'Worthing Birding' WhatsApp message from Stephen Simpson to say that he’d just seen a Wheatear at Goring Gap which he suspected was a Desert. The attached photograph did indeed show a male Desert Wheatear, only the 2nd ever spring record for Sussex (most UK records are in late autumn). We knew that Goring Gap would be heaving with people being a sunny Sunday afternoon so it was a relief to hear that Nick Bond had refound the bird and it was still present. By the time we got there, a small crowd of local birders had gathered and were watching the bird feeding along the shingle beach below the greensward. In the hour or so we watched it for, it was very active flying from groyne to groyne, giving excellent views at times. A lovely bird and my 5th in Sussex, tempting to think that its' arrival was linked to the Saharan dust that fell from the sky when it rained on Wednesday. Also seen were 12+ Sanderling on the beach and a Mediterranean Gull heading up Channel. 





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