It's been a while.

Hello internets, it's been a while. I like to think you've missed me, and I'd ask, if I thought I'd like the answer. I've not been two weeks without blogging since the start. It's been so long since I've written anything here that I've forgotten half of what I've seen the past fortnight. Funnily enough I can remember far clearer the things I've actively looked for and not seen - wood warblers, pied flys, wood sands, ospreys, redstarts, spoonbills - and that's only for starters. Time for another bullet-point summary:

• I dipped the wood warblers in Regent's park several times. The second time I visited I sifted through heaps of willow warblers and was briefly rewarded with a long yellow bird flitting into the canopy and out of sight, but I was already several minutes late and couldn't stay to chase it. Unbearably frustrating, and I couldn't look for it the next day because...

• We went to Swanage that Friday. We hit up Arne, as per usual, which was fairly disappointing. A couple of new butterfly species out on the heath were nice, but elsewhere in the area we could only scrape together a few ravens, med gulls and boring waders.

• Last Friday I scored moderately at Rainham with a female merlin over the seawall in the early morning. Despite my best efforts I couldn't pull a serin out of the large and interesting flock on the mound (yep, it's that time of year again). There were also four avocets in the bay and more yellow-legged gulls than I cared to count. Other visits to Rainham since then have been interesting enough on the wader front but I've missed literally everything good.
  

• I had a greenshank at the Ingrebourne, a patch tick. Picked it up on call overhead and was bothered enough to chase it over to Berwick res where I thought it had gone down, but I was unable to find it again. Pew-pew-pew. Very satisfying indeed.
  

• Today, 4 small waders flew north over the office. They felt like green sandpipers, but I'll never know. Seriously exciting.

And now, I'm sitting at home rather than watching that white-winged tern at Rainham because some shitting peregrine chased it off. Shoot them all - it's not just racing pigeons that suffer from the veritable plague of RSPB-introduced, unwanted, baby-eating raptors.

No pictures. There are some fairly interesting - ok, boring - pictures I took at Arne, but they're all on the girl's camera and I don't have it.