Saturday 1st September 2012 - You can always tell it's a good twitch when.......

Its the 1st September and Autumn has arrived. We started off at Westport, where there was a flock of eleven Wigeon to herald in the new season. An AMERICAN BLACK TERN had been found near St Helens and we half considered going for it, especially as GAS still needed it. When negative news came from Eccleston Mere, we headed off down to Blithfield.

Two MARSH HARRIERS had been present for most of the week, and so the plan was to sit in the hide in Tad and wait. The Osprey was already sat in the tree waiting for us, and gave me an opportunity to repeat the photo's I took of it last year, when it was sat in the same tree.

Osprey at Blithfield

We sat for about an hour, seeing a couple of Raven, a Buzzard, a Sparrowhawk, and I counted 363 Tufted Duck in the bay. Then news came through that the AMERICAN BLACK TERN had been refound at Pennington Flash in Greater Manchester. We decided to head north. The journey up the M6 was a little bit slow, but it took us less than an hour and a half to get to Pennington.

Luckily, as we arrived, the juvenile American Black Tern was sat on a buoy, but it soon flew off. We then had to quickly remember the id pointers of it in flight, but the dusky underwing was quite obvious once you had your eye in.

Above - 3 pictures of the AmBT. (Bottom one by PJ)



The first twitch of the Autumn was a nice straight forward one, and a Lee tick for GAS. We headed over to Frodsham afterwards, but there wasn't much on show.

And finally, you can always tell it's a good twitch when.....

.................there's an ice cream van on site!