Seeing a huge flock of a normally scarce passage visitor so close to home made Michael Richards’ day
7 MAY 2019
It’s always going to be hard to pick out a single day as the best of your birding life, but after a lot of thought I came up with mine. It didn’t involve one of the rarest species I’ve seen, or a lot of life ticks, or anything like that. It was just a case of being in the right place at the right time.
I live near to Oxford, and do most of my birdwatching within a few miles of home, but there are a few sites a little bit further afield that I visit when I think there’s a chance to see something a bit out of the ordinary.
That was the case this day. I seem to remember it being sunny all day, but quite windy, too, and it was that time of year when there’s always a few Black Terns popping up on gravel pits and reservoirs in the south Midlands, as they head north towards their breeding grounds. I almost always manage to see one or two, but usually at quite a distance.
On this day I was struggling to find time to do any birding, which was a shame because a few of the websites I’d looked at had shown some migrants heading our way.
After finishing work, I had a few errands to run, so it was after 6pm when I was finally able to put the scope and binoculars in the car and head out to Farmoor Reservoir, where reports that morning had placed Arctic and Black Terns.
I got there, got set up, and started scanning through the terns that were f lying around quite close to the shore. Some were definitely Commons, but with a bit of patience and the help of my trusty Collins guide, I was able to pick out a couple of Arctics, so elegant and almost ethereal in the evening sunlight.
I’d been so absorbed that I didn’t really start looking out into the middle of the reservoir properly until 20 minutes later. But, when I did, I quickly found a Black Tern, skimming over the water pickin
