Otmoor - Black Kite!

My favourite from a rather gripping series of photos!

Each year I help teach an ornithology field course for undergraduate biologists at the university, and as part of this we typically take the students to Otmoor for a morning. It's an amazing place to show them the dawn chorus, and most non-birders will have heard of Cuckoos, even if they've never seen them before. This trip has produced a few nice birds in the past - Turnstone (good record for Otmoor), Ringed Plovers and Dunlin on a drizzly morning in 2021, and a flyover Spoonbill in 2022 (joint find with Ben Sheldon). It also produced a minor minibus crash in 2024, which was probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my career. Regardless of the presence of any rarities, the students always enjoy it, so we keep taking them there each year.

I actually had quite high hopes for our outing on 8th May as a mild south-easterly was forecast, with the potential for some rain later in the morning. Sadly this never materialised, but the overcast sky was a nice change from the blazing anticyclonic conditions that have characterised the last few weeks (and baked dry the Port Meadow floods). A walk down the bridleway and a check of Big Otmoor failed to produce anything interesting to show other than some Cuckoos and Hobbies, so we walked to the first screen. Ben soon joined me with his group of students.

At around 10:20am I was scanning the sky with bins when I noticed an odd-looking raptor. It was extremely distant (well beyond the flood field) but initially quite low over the trees, heading towards the church on the horizon. What drew me to it was its shape - it looked to have a squared-off tail, but was quite compact and broad-winged, so not a Marsh Harrier. I could see no plumage details other than the fact that it was dark, and to be honest even this was hard to see as it was a tiny speck. I called Ben over and clearly he noticed the urgency in my voice, although at this point I didn't think it would turn out to be anything particularly unusual.

It began circling higher and higher heading north, and although Ben could just about see it as a dot in his bins he couldn't locate it using his new stabilised Swarovski scope! I opted to try and take photos instead, although the camera was struggling to focus with the subject being so small. Thankfully I already had the 2x extender on, so I hoped I would be able to capture some detail using the 1200mm equivalent field of view (24x magnification). I held the shutter button down and took around 200 photos. I then tried to get some views of it using one of the other scopes that we had brought - after a couple of minutes I eventually found it in the sky, although I was really struggling - and by that point it was already extremely distant and flying away from us, so I could see nothing useful on it. I lost the bird in the clouds a couple of minutes after initially picking it up.

I had a look through my photos and was confused. I was finding it difficult to review them properly and take back-of-camera shots in the strong sunlight, so I tried to find some shade. It looked like a Black Kite, which is what my gut instinct had told me even through bins, but it seemed to have quite a strong upperwing pattern (more like a Red Kite) and I was wondering if I could see a hint of rufous in the plumage. I also thought that the tail was very worn, and possibly squared-off due to a break along a fault bar rather than that being its natural shape? However, the structure was undeniable, with six fingers and shorter, broader-tipped wings than a Red Kite. It was also not in moult, contrary to most of the Red Kites.

Since the bird was long gone I decided to send the back-of-camera photos to a few friends and wait for feedback rather than put out news immediately, as I had significant doubts. It was so distant that I was worrying about camera artefacts and distortion making it look more interesting in the photos than it actually was, especially given the lack of real field views through optics. I did think that it was unlikely to just be a weird-looking Red Kite, but could a hybrid be eliminated? Or maybe I was totally wrong? Despite Ben being very enthusiastic about it being a Black Kite from just a brief look at the photos, I wanted to examine them properly on a computer screen before making a call this big. Black Kite is a properly rare bird in Oxfordshire (although several have been claimed this is likely to be only the third substantive record), and I had never seen one in Britain before.

We headed back along the bridleway and Steve Lavington was the first to respond to my photos with a cautious thumbs up for Black Kite. Then, things got really interesting when Tom Bedford sent through this message.

Less than ten minutes before our sighting! I looked up from my phone and standing not far from me was, presumably, the person who reported the bird - looking over Greenaways with his bins and scope. I hurried up to him and asked if he had seen anything. "Had a Black Kite earlier" "Seems like we did as well!" and showed him the photos. Apparently, he had seen it at relatively close range initially through bins and then at length through a scope, as it came from the south west and flew first east and then north over Greenaways. Congratulations all around, and he introduced himself as Robert Crofton, from Gloucestershire. Although I still had a grain of doubt, his independent sighting and identification bolstered my confidence a bit, so I decided to post my back-of-camera photos to the Oxon WhatsApp group as a probable Black Kite, and included information about Robert's earlier observation. Ian Lewington had also replied by this point and said that it looked pretty good to him, although with the bird at such distance I should be a bit cautious with the photos.

However, upon getting back to Wytham and downloading them to my computer any worries I had about the identification of the bird were alleviated. I always find that back-of-camera photos look a bit weird - I think the camera applies some JPG-level processing when generating the preview, with sharpening artefacts and increased contrast often apparent. This is of course compounded when taking photos of the screen with a phone, as this applies a second level of automatic processing. My photos viewed on the computer were actually quite blurry compared to what I was expecting from the back-of-camera preview (in fact, most had missed focus), but otherwise showed a bog-standard Black Kite - the strong upperwing pattern and hints of other spurious features were simply artefacts on the back-of-camera shots. In one photo, the upperwing does look rather pale, but I think this was the bird catching a ray of strong sunlight through the cloud. Indeed, it looks much darker in all the other photos, and even then the colour is more bleached light-brown rather than rufous. I am happy that this bird shows all features which support its identification as a Black Kite - six-fingered wing formula, compact overall structure with much more shallowly-forked tail than Red Kite, brown tail concolorous with the upperparts, relatively muted upperwing pattern, and lack of strong primary panel on the underwing. It was just a shame that it wasn't closer!

I've included a selection of the better photos here, completely unedited, which I think is important for a record like this. My usual denoising and sharpening process would just introduce artefacts with the bird being so small in the frame and soft due to heat haze. The last one is an example of what the photo looked like without any cropping - with the field of view being at 24x magnification. Now imagine seeing the bird a third of this size through 8x bins, which are the field views that we got! Despite the photos being objectively rubbish I think it's still quite a gripping series - which is perhaps true of many evocative shots of rarities...

    

I think that this event demonstrates the importance nowadays of carrying a camera when out birding - not only for obtaining a record shot of a bird that has already been identified, but also resolving the identification and documenting something that would have otherwise escaped detection. Arguably neither Ben nor I got tickable views in the field. If we had heard about the independent report afterwards, without our own photos I don't think either of us would have said that we saw the bird.

I would also like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone at Otmoor who felt that I withheld news of the Black Kite from them. Hopefully this account demonstrates why it was not twitchable, and short of actually being at the reedbed with us there would have been no way of seeing it (and even then, it would have been difficult). We had essentially no useful field views of the bird. At the end of the day, I wasn't sure until I had looked properly at the photos and didn't want to put out a stringy report - it was also long gone anyway by the time word had filtered through of Robert's earlier sighting. In general, I make an effort to try and put out news of any rare bird I find as quickly as possible, and act in a transparent way upon doing so.

After my musings about county listing at the end of my last blog post I'm so happy to add a self-found UK lifer so soon after wondering what my next county tick would be. Now away for a week on Copeland with the field course so fingers crossed that nothing else turns up!

View across Mew Island from Lighthouse Island, as I write this blog post

American Golden Plover and Portland weekend

American Golden Plover, Otmoor

A universal rule of county birding is that whenever you leave the county, rare birds turn up. I'm often away at bird observatories at peak migration times so it seems inevitable that these trips coincide with good county birds. In the last few years I've been out of county when Pallid Harrier, Roseate Tern and Arctic Skua have turned up - hopefully all birds that I can get back - and narrowly avoided another catastrophic miss with the Red-footed Falcon in May 2025, which was thankfully rediscovered upon my return from Ireland. I'm aware that I've got off pretty lightly compared to some other county listers (including one of our leading listers, who has been away for both Common Nighthawk and Bluethroat), and Adam's very unfortunate Ring-billed Gull dip, but each miss still hurts!

2cy Red-footed Falcon at Standlake in May 2025 - perhaps here is a good place to tell the story of this twitch. Ben and I were in the middle of teaching the undergraduate field course when Simon Myers refound the bird. We had only 90 minutes to connect whilst the students were being lectured by someone else, so we left Wytham immediately and had a bit of a hair-raising drive down the A420 in one of the hire minibuses. We arrived at the Maybush pub about 25 minutes after Simon's initial text, left the minibus in the car park and then began running along the Thames tow path towards the bird. Ben tripped and got left behind almost immediately - "you go on!" so I ran the mile or so towards where Simon was and connected. I began taking pics and after a few minutes Ben arrived, got onto the bird, and almost immediately had to leave again to be back in time for the students! Amazingly, no one noticed that we had gone...

It was therefore absolutely typical that shortly after my arrival at Portland Bird Observatory last weekend, a message came through on the Oxon WhatsApp group about a possible American Golden Plover at Otmoor, which had then been reported on Birdguides. At the time, I was in the process of dipping Bonaparte's Gull on the Fleet, after a relatively birdless morning at the Obs - so I wasn't best pleased. The timeline for this bird's discovery was rather unclear, and frustrating to follow from afar. Apparently it had first been seen early on Saturday morning by some photographers, but only recognised as a European Golden Plover (indeed, there is at least one eBird checklist which has been retrospectively edited). The identification was then questioned when a photo of this bird was posted to Facebook, but apparently those in the hide had been deliberating all morning, with comments about a Golden Plover sp. separately posted to the Oxon Birding Blog.

Quite why it took until lunchtime for a report to make it onto Birdguides is baffling, and illustrates some of the issues with bird reporting in this county. Regardless, there were still further questions over the identification, which were only resolved mid-afternoon, where additional photos from Steve Sansom seemed to confirm what was (in my opinion) pretty obvious from the beginning.

The Fleet just west of Bridging Camp - my view for the Bonaparte's dip and AGP message

The combination of a poor birding day at Portland, dipping the Bonaparte's and the American Golden Plover news made the rest of the weekend rather challenging for me. Indeed, I only made it through by venting about the bird, identification and state of county listing to everyone else at the Obs, who were completely sick of hearing about it by the end. At least my frustration has inspired this blog post!

Conditions were slightly better on Sunday, with a clear arrival of birds overnight. With several ringers already working the garden nets, I chose to go up to the West Cliffs to try some vismigging in the light northeasterly wind. There was very little overhead, with just a single Tree Pipit, an unseasonal flock of nine Siskin, a Dunlin and a few hirundines through north. It was pleasing to see the bushes come alive with birds as I sat there, with first a nice male Whinchat perching up on the fenceline, before several Redstarts began hopping out of the bushes. As I walked back down to the Obs, more and more Redstarts appeared - classic spring birding on Portland! Sadly I failed to locate any Pied Flycatchers myself, and had to fall back on twitching one at Reap Lane in the evening.

New portable vismig station - very pleased with the Dodotronic parabolic plus mini tripod stand thing

Monday morning dawned clear and cold in a stiff easterly. I tried a short seawatch without seeing much except a flock of Bar-tailed Godwits going up the channel. At 7am there was still no report of the American Golden Plover, so I impatiently messaged the WhatsApp group. Max Buckley replied that he was 20 minutes away from the hide. Cue 20 minutes of fidgeting before finally came the good news that I had been waiting for – it was still present!

I finished up at the Obs and set off on the three-hour drive to Otmoor, which thankfully went by without any delays. I pulled up at the car park and began walking briskly towards the Wetland Watch hide - no scope, as I thought that would slow me down too much. I met Geoff Wyatt coming the other way, who informed me that the bird appeared fairly settled. I hurried on, getting more and more tense - in fact, it's been a while since I've felt quite so neurotic on a twitch!

I practically burst into the hide, where a few people were apparently watching the American Golden Plover. I didn't know any of them and I assumed none were local. Despite some mumblings that it was showing, there was a total lack of directions. Scanning the shoreline with bins, I couldn't immediately see it - clearly it was much more distant than I thought, and I was cursing not bringing the scope. Still no directions from the masses. Panic. Could this situation get any more comical? I spotted something pale moving in the grass on the far side of the pool. "Is that blob it? IS THAT IT?!" - "yes". I took a couple of photos to try and confirm. No offer from anybody to look through their scopes.

View from the hide - the AGP was initially distant, on the shore underneath that group of small trees, before moving left to that central spit at the back of the main pool

Eventually I pieced together some decent views, mostly by looking down my camera viewfinder and magnifying as much as possible. I was struck both by the colour and jizz of the bird - never appearing dumpy like a European Golden Plover. The cap was so dark, producing a really distinctive face pattern, and the flanks were grey and dusky. The primary projection was obvious, as was its leggy gait. What a classic bird, brilliant.

People were coming and going from the hide, and after about an hour I was left with the bird to myself. It had barely moved, feeding in the same small area of grass (and even sleeping for short periods), but then for some reason it got spooked and flew a short distance to a muddy spit that was a bit closer to the hide. I was able to get some acceptable record shots by videoing the bird, extracting some of the least blurred stills and then processing these videocaptures.

This was the only stills shot that I kept - much lower apparent resolution than the videocapture method

I think I struck lucky with this bird as it was gone the following morning! Adam, and others, had urged me to just twitch it from Portland (either cutting short my stay or doing the ridiculous and going to and from the Obs). I'm glad I didn't, but I think this was clearly cutting it fine for a crucial county bird. This is only the third record, with the other two being from Port Meadow - sadly well before my time. The American Golden Plover was also a new bird for our highest Oxfordshire lister, bringing him to 280, which prompted me to think a bit about the state of county birding.

2026 seems to be following a similar trajectory to 2025 in terms of Oxfordshire punching above its weight for rare birds – so far we’ve already had Ring-billed Gull, American Wigeon, Green-winged Teal, American Golden Plover and Black-winged Stilt (latter four all on Otmoor, and two found by me!) as well as a range of county scarcities like Long-tailed Duck, Glossy Ibis and Tundra Bean Goose. Combined with some really engaging patch birding, with the Port Meadow floods remaining well into April (Kittiwake, Little Gull, Whimbrel, Bar-tailed Godwit, Wood Sandpiper, Nightingale and Osprey all in the last couple of months), this has meant that my enthusiasm for local birding is possibly at an all time high. A complete contrast to how I felt at this time last year!

Black-winged Stilt on Otmoor - great find by Max, and my second in the county

I’ve already added three new county ticks, bringing me to 231, and I’ve been thinking about whether I could reach 240 before my contract potentially ends in September 2027. There is only one annually occurring, regular species that I still need to see – Curlew Sandpiper (unless you count Hoopoe which seems to occur every year in gardens but is basically never twitchable). Other low-hanging fruit would be Red-breasted Merganser, Red-necked Grebe, any Diver other than Great Northern Diver and any Shrike. Glaucous Gull, meanwhile, seems like a bit of a pipe dream at this point.

Ben Sheldon pointed out that he’s managed to see the same number of species as me in five years as I have in ten, so I think I’m trending below average in terms of how long I’ve been birding in the county. A few things I won’t get back, but I feel like any new additions are equally as likely to be new birds for the county than they are old blockers. Really looking forward to seeing what turns up next.