I love the excitement and exhilaration of twitching a new bird, but obviously with temporal and financial constraints it is just not feasible to do this as much as I would like. Having said that, I get a massive amount of satisfaction from finding 'good' birds on my local patches. This is especially so during 'spring' and 'autumn' migration times as you never know what will turn up. I readily admit that my record of finding rare and scarce birds is rather poor but aside from that, finding 'year ticks' is the bread and butter of much of my birding. Recently and contrary to a very late highland spring, a trickle of migrants have been pushing through and aside from the regular willow warblers, sand martins and wheatears I have enjoyed a flurry of white wagtails (alba), a single osprey and a handful of whimbrel- birding at its' very rewarding best!
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| osprey- pretty uncommon in the extreme NW |
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| wheatear |
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| whimbrel |
