I had a phonecall at 0715hrs this pleasant Sunday morning. "Are you sitiing down?" a voice enquired.

It was Nick, and the request was because, despite living in the centre of London, he was already at Grove Ferry, camera bag along for the ride and wanted to know what time I would be there??

Having only just dragged myself out of bed I mumbled something about not being long and replaced the phone in it's holder.

Many more birds than normal

Nick had, on a number of previous occasions, said he was going to come to Stodmarsh early on a given day and I have long since stopped expecting it to actually happen. Well, at that time in the morning anyway!

I arrived at the hide about an hour later, along with Shirley who had decided she would like to come along. My previous couple of trips to the hide at the Grove Ferry end of the reserve had proved fairly fruitless, so I went lightly loaded. Murphy and his law came along too, because, due to the low water levels generally around the area, the small lake in front of the hide was packed.

There were literally flocks of Little Egret flying in and out, along with numerous duck species, the resident swan, terns doing their spectacular dives, Lapwings, a couple od Snipe and Green Sandpiper and numerous Cormorant all doing there own thing.

In the reeds there was plenty of movement from the Reed Warblers, with occasional showings good enough to get the odd image and I was informed that I had just missed the Kingfisher. With my record of always missing them this year, that did not surprise me in the slightest! It had, apparently, even used the roof of the hide to bash one of it's captures into submission!

Young Male KF with a part morphed tadpole.

Putting in an appearance across the lake was a couple of young Marsh Harriers, not long out of the nest and it was them that eventually made the kingfisher depart. While he was watching one, the other tried creeping up on him and shot past the front of the hide seconds after the kingfisher had shot off down the dyke.

Around the 1130hrs mark, we got ourselves upright, on this occasion Nick stuggling the most, having been sat there for 4+ hours and as we came out onto the path, there was one of the young Harriers strolling down it.

Young Harrier wandering on the path

All in all, a very interesting morning in good company (Don't tell Nick I said that!)