The nomadic life offers opportunities for last-minute changes of plan. I saw, by chance, a sign for Pulborough Brooks, an RSPB reserve, and had a few restful hours bird-spotting and taking pix. The wetlands were quite animated, with the loudest noise being the honking of geese and the whistling of wigeons. I saw kites, buzzards, marsh harrier, shovelers, teal and black tailed godwit, but the star attraction was a pectoral sandpiper: tiny, demure and unshowy. It was my first sighting (and I wouldn’t have been able to identify it without help from a couple of expert guys)…
According to an entry on the RSPB website, “Pectoral sandpipers breed in the Arctic areas of North America and Siberia and are very long distance migrants wintering mainly in South America, with some birds in the Siberian population wintering in Australia or New Zealand. Some birds winter in Africa. They are classed in the UK and Western Europe as scarce passage migrants as a few birds turn up each year and they have been seen at Pulborough very occasionally before”…
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