Just the warm-up act?

Popped out this afternoon to The Naze – a decent site that I probably don’t visit often enough, given the potential it’s got. (I also don’t know how regularly it’s checked at the moment – any ideas?) Anyway, it was rather good, with a decent scatter of autumn migrants and no other birders. The only downside was the ridiculous number of dogs romping around, being utterly ignored by their loud but vacant owners. S’pose it is Essex, though…

Anyway, back to the birds. I had a slow wander around the undercliff area to start off with, almost immediately stumbling across a Brambling and this rather nice (and very tame) Lesser Redpoll feeding in the pathside weeds:

Over the course of the afternoon, I heard about half a dozen more Redpolls calling overhead – most likely all Lessers. Continuing further north through the scrub on no particular route, a few Goldcrest and Chaffinch were feeding either side of the path, so I resumed Shetland-style tactics with a bit of pishing to see what else might come in. Shetland-style, this did:

Yawn! Yet another one… but still, Yellow-browed Warblers are rather lovely, and when you think how far they’ve come, quite impressive migrants. Unusually, this one didn’t call at all during the 10 minutes or so that I watched it, perhaps too busy feeding up again!

Around the rest of the site, a couple of Swallows were overhead on their way south, and I was pretty surprised to flush a Jack Snipe out of some long grass and low brambles – presumably another newly arrived migrant. Returning back to the car just before dusk, a good concentration of thrushes in the western hedges contained at least one of the hoped-for Ring Ouzels, photographed here at ridiculously high ISO.

So, not bad for less than four hours out. It’s raining here now, and the wind is due to go round into the NE overnight. Hopefully that’ll bring plenty onto the coast tomorrow, where I’ll be from dawn!