Ton up...

Another pleasant spring day's birding, this time in Suffolk with Jonathan (thanks for driving!). Early doors we got pretty decent, though distant, views of the Purple Heron on the deck and in flight at Shingle Street. The bird appears to be very wary, so hopefully the bank holiday twitchers won't boot it about too much. Also bumped into Adrian and Matthew again, but none of us could find any other migrants to speak of - just 2 female Wheatear some way south of the allotments.

We decided to press on straight up to Minsmere to avoid the worst of the Bank Holiday crowds, and then proceeded to wander round slowly with cameras... dudetastic! At least we knew what we were looking at (or listening to), namely: 8+ ad Med Gulls (kyow!), Bittern (oooom), Common Tern (chik...chik....krrr), Nightingale (errr... no chance!), Reed Warbler, Sanderling and a whole host of other bits and pieces. Note the subject of the last photo - any vestige of 'proper birder' credibility is sinking fast... ;)





While we were having lunch, it struck us that the day list was probably not too bad, and after a bit of totting up, the score was just over 80. Being terribly sad, list-obsessed people, the lure of 100 in a day was just too much to resist, so we went home via:

• Westleton for Dartford Warbler
• somewhere nearby for singing Black Redstart
• Wolves Wood for just about nothing
• Old Hall for a Spoonbill and various waders
• Abberton for two handsome Slav Grebes, some wildfowl and a Whitethroat - when this finally gave itself up late in the day, we'd seen 104 species, and it was my 200th of the year.

We still missed heaps of easy birds (Mistle Thrush, Yellowhammer and Sparrowhawk spring to mind), so a realistic target with some proper effort and less photographic interludes would probably be 120+ on this route.