On Wednesday June 25th David and I spent the day in the Ashdown Forest south of the road between Royal Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead. The choice of location was driven by a twitch bird, the UK's first Short-toed Eagle.
We arrived to hear that the bird had been around that morning but had not been seen for half an hour, and so we took a hike across the heathland where we saw many Stonechats and Linnet and several Tree Pipits, my first of these in many years. A probable Wood Lark did not cooperate enough for me to add this to my life list. We also saw a couple of Reed Buntings in what did not appear to be their natural habitat. Alas we failed to find an Adder although others had seen that that morning! As we came to the end of our hike we saw a couple of birders looking high in the air, and we were treated to 10 minutes of the Short-toed Eagle. We saw it hovering like a kestrel and flying around with totally horizontal wings.
We made another couple of stops in the forest after that and I added Coal Tit, Great-spotted Woodpecker and Redstart for the year.
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