Completing the Dowitchers (03/08/13)

On the 3rd me and Samuel were eventually at home and had a free weekend. This left us to the choice to be able to go twitch something for the first time in a long time. Chris was interested to go see the Dowitcher down at Pennington Marshes and so were we. When the Saturday eventually came we left at around 5:30am from Kings Langley. It didn’t take us long before we were parked up and walking to pool. On the way we did a little birding trying to find something for ourselves like a Wood Sandpiper. We were fruitless in our efforts and arrived at the pool when the largest congregation of twitchers had gathered. Then after a little looking we were rewarded with a stunning Adult Long-billed Dowitcher. After looking at the bird for a while we found the Curlew Sandpipers which was a boggy bird for me and then headed back to find the Little Stint but were rewarded with only some Dunlin and Greenshank. After a while we gave up on the search and headed back to the dowitcher when we arrived we were informed that it hadn’t been seen in a while so we carried on to do some more general this time we managed to see a Sanderling along with some Turnstone. Then on the way back to the car we stopped off at the Dowitcher spot one last time to see it, but it still had not been seen so we stuck around and hoped that we would be the ones to find it. We gave up after a short while and carried on but when we were half way around the pool Samuel had fond the Dowitcher and called over the other twitchers, the problem had been that we had been looking from a different angle so it had been hidden from us but from where we were looking we had some nice scope views. Other noteable species were Ringed and Little Ringed Plover. We then moved on to Acres Down in hope of some Woodland species after a nice walk through the woods we came out with: Common Redstart, Crossbill, Treecreeper and a possible tree pipit.