Racing into 2016

By Mike Russell

Senior Conservation Advisor

For the second year running, Mike’s Mergansers, consisting of Mike English, Jan Jupp, Lesley Milward and myself, have participated in the Sussex Ornithological Society New Year Bird Race, basically a chance to spend a day to see how many birds you can record in a 24 hour period. Last year, we confined ourselves to Sussex Wildlife Trust Reserves (and the bits in between getting to them!) and recorded 84 species. This year we had no such restraints and recorded…84 species!

Now recorded means that you can just hear them as well as see them and 3 out of 4 of you have to be happy with the identification, so to hear a drumming great spotted woodpecker or yaffling of a green woodpecker means that you don’t have to waste precious seconds looking for them. We set out on Monday and in this so called winter of continual rain and gales we managed not to get drenched or blown over, quite an achievement we all thought.

Starting off in the gloom at Church Norton, the birds came thick and fast as waders came flocking in to feed on the increasingly exposed mud. With bird races you have to discard the aesthetics of birding, just tick them off then look for the next species. This is easier said than done, and it’s hard not to appreciate a whimbrel, walking close by, the wild calls of the curlew and the tight knot of knots flying in to feed. Also you cannot help to stop and admire when hundreds of Brent geese take to the air. A couple of peregrines sitting out on an island were a great sighting while a chiffchaff was an unexpected welcome addition. After an hour or so we left Church Norton having clocked up nearly 50 species, but strangely no little egret.

Brief stops at the Ferry Pool, where an overflying flock of golden plover was a real treat, and at Ivy Lake added a few more species so by the time we got to West Dean Woods we were already motoring with over 60 species and fortified with some excellent home-made cakes and chocolate eclairs. As last year, the little owl wasn’t sitting in his usual tree, the hawfinches were noticeable by their absence and we couldn’t find a firecrest, for which this is the most likely place to see them. But we did add some tricky woodland species, marsh tit. nuthatch and treecreeper and it was full of goldcrests. A red kite also appeared, a species 15 years ago you would never have seen in Sussex.

It was then up to the Burgh near Arundel for downland where this prolific birding site only gave us one new species, a house sparrow! This is the quandary that a Bird Race gives; do you cut your losses and move on or spend more time looking for those expected species that decide to conceal themselves why you are there; we opted for the former and set off for our final destination, Pulborough Brooks, calling in at Swanbourne Lake for gadwall and a feral pigeon!

Arriving at mid-Afternoon we realised our hoped for 100 species was now a distant dream, so we set about enjoying the last couple of hours watching a huge flock of black-tailed godwits performing wonderful acrobatics in the late afternoon sun, we nearly managed to overlook the snipe sitting in front of us. A quartering short-eared owl was the icing on the cake. Spending much of the day at two premier wetland sites in Sussex and not seeing a little egret now is quite an achievement, but 84 is a very respectable total, but more importantly, we helped to raise funds for SOS that are then ploughed back into conservation in Sussex, as well as having a really great day out.