Thursley common 12/12/20

 The tale of Thursley Common 12/12/20

I have been gripped by these buntings at Thursley common for a couple of weeks now, trying to persuade my Dad to take us with no luck as we are "busy surveying". So when Isaac West said he was going and offered me a lift, I took him up and what a great decision that was! I ended up with two life ticks and one extra year tick, bringing my life list to 254 and my year list to a personal record of 220 (previous best 200). 

The day started at 6:30 at the Oxford service station, where Isaac picked me up and we were off, though little down hearted as it was raining for about half of the journey and we thought it was going to be like the disastrous Otmoor trip we had in the spring. Luckily, as we got to lovely Guildford the weather started to clear up and we had hope! We managed to find the car park very easily with the help from Finley. As I got out of the car, the first bird I had was a crossbill and from then on we knew it would be a good day. Not all started well though; as we were about to go, Isaac some how managed to snap his tripod head leaving him scopeless for the whole day... I did offer him my glue stick that some how ended up in one of my boots but we decided that probably wouldn't of worked!

So we set off out onto the common following the twitchers with massive lenses. As we got to the first clearing, we had our first redpoll of the morning going over. These were in good numbers over the day but only in flight. We also quickly found out that we probably should have put our wellies on rather than walking boots as the recent rain had made the common very wet. On the way to the twitch, lots of geese were leaving the roost which we religiously checked for white fronts but no luck (we later found out that there was one there but we didn't see it). As we arrived to the twitch, all the twitchers were on their phones or looking away which is never a good sign. Turns out we had missed both the buntings together in the same tree by about 10 mins. Luckily, it didn't take long for the little bunting to show very nicely feeding on the ground. As we were watching the little bunting some Egyptian Geese flew over and suddenly everyone turned round not sure why! About 10 mins later we had lovely views of our first woodlarks of the day as one sat on a tree and performed amazingly, with some lovely sub-song. For some reason me and Isaac decided to leave the twitch for a bit to go and sound record the woodlark! We needed it for our new Ichos twitter account (go give it a follow @Birdingichos). As we got back, someone had managed to get on the Rustic Bunting so we got nice (if a bit short) views of that until it flushed with the other Reed Buntings. At this point, we had the news that the Great Grey Shrike (GGS) had been re-found so us and David Bevan decided to go on a shrike hunt...

A Lee Evans type photo courtesy of David 

Little Bunting

Egyptian Geese emerging from the dark 

We ended up walking a full lap of the common because every so often I would get a text from Arjun saying it had moved! We picked up lots of lots of lovely birds while wandering round like Dartford warbler and Crossbill. Me and Isaac stood and tried to photo a Dartford for ages, which eventually caused us to miss the shrike at the twitch. We stuck around that area for a while but no luck; however we did get our shots of the Dartfords. We decided that missing the shrike was not an option, so we carried on hunting until I eventually clocked eyes on the stunning GGS, right in the middle of the common. Always distant but showing well so no complaints there!

Male Crossbill

Dartford Warbler

Great Grey Shrike

Isaac looking at some nice mud :)

That concluded our trip to Thursley! I thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope you enjoyed reading about it and seeing my amazing record shots. Feel free to comment on here or on my Twitter!