This year the Surrey OC have released details of an established Honey Buzzard watchpoint so I thought I'd give it a go for this years fix at it's only about fifteen miles from Thursley Common.
We stopped at Thursley first being closer to home and walked the common for a couple of hours from first light. We had a garden warbler by the moat to give Jim a nice early year tick before finding lot's of Woodlark including a couple of juveniles. Tree Pipits were abundant and several Dartford Warblers flitted about here and there. Lot's of Stonechat with many juveniles and a Cuckoo added to the days spectacle. Swift and Swallow hawked around the bog and several Lizards were seen on the boardwalks. We spent a while looking for the Red-backed Shrike that's been around since 25th May but didn't find it. As we walked back to the car I spotted our only Redstart of the morning to add another year tick and the bird allowed a couple of pictures before retreating back into the copse.
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| Redstart |
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| Redstart |
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| Redstart |
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| Stonechat |
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| Stonechat |
We left Thursley and headed to the new raptor watchpoint driving up the single dead end lane to the small car park where we found about thirty like minded souls and arrived to news that we'd missed just one Honey Buzzard so far. Over the next couple of hours we enjoyed five views of Honey Buzzard with at least two seperate birds and probably more. The birds gave great scope views but remained a little distant for my little 400mm camera lens. Common Buzzard, Red Kites, Kestrel, Sparrowhawk and Raven made up the best of the rest here. This is a nice new place for us and I'm sure we'll return for more time with these great summer visitors.
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| Record shot of one of the Honey Buzzards |
On the way home we tried for Spotted Flycatchers at a local spot we'd been tipped off on but failed to find the target birds despite the intel.
Year list now 212
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