Today's Honey Buzzard over Easton - a fine specimen of one of the very best scarce migrants © Mark Litjens:
There was a faintly amusing incident early today that could so easily have ended in tears: dawn's so early these days and the supply of migrants has dwindled so much that we're no longer bothering with getting up literally at day-break to open the nets at the Obs; however, the nocmig recorder is still running at this time and on going through the recording later we discovered that there was a Corn Bunting singing really close by for 15 minutes at 5am - by the time we were up half-an-hour later it was long gone! It's a nice record as it's the first this year but we were left feeling a great sense of relief that it hadn't been something a lot better like a Cretzschmar's Bunting!
Whilst on the subject of sounds, a few days ago we mentioned the nocmig Dotterel and alluded to a few other decent records during that period in late April/early May; of these, the best were three loggings of Stone Curlew: the first was during the evening of 26th April whilst the other two were on the night of 2nd/3rd May - although more than three hours apart we'd have an inkling from the similarity of the calls that these last two loggings refer to the same individual that perhaps pitched in nearby before resuming migration later in the night.