Tag: West Hill & Castle Rocks
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November-December 2024
November and December can mean only one thing: gulls, and particularly the passage of large gulls which seems to occur in Sussex at this time of year. My impression is that that years passage was more protracted, with numbers never quite reaching the heights of the great westward movements of late December last year. There…
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October 2024
Coverage was a bit limited during October due to quite a bit of time away for work, but the transition into the final stages of autumn migration was apparent even so. Witnessing this was the focus of my birding, which was almost entirely at the coastal sites of West Hill and Hastings CP. With many…
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September 2024
September is when visible migration really steps up a gear and my birding time over the month was largely spent soaking it up. It was a wet and unsettled month weather wise and this may have contributed to those those days of finer weather being particularly lively. Movement seems to occur on a broad front…
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August 2024
The first half of August was warm and relatively calm, with some great days for observing migration. In the third week of the month the remains of Hurricane Ernesto passed over the UK, bringing with it strong winds and rain which largely put a hold on movement. This was followed by a final period of…
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July 2024
The long, warm days of July can mean only one thing: it’s time to start looking for that keenly awaited marker of midsummer; the arrival of juvenile Yellow-legged Gull from southern Europe. My first this year came on the 13th, with a flyby watched moving west from West Hill. In marked contrast to the riches…
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April 2024 birding roundup
An odd month weather wise, which made it feel quite unlike spring at times. The first half was dominated by strong SW winds while the second was characterised by winds with a northerly aspect and associated low temperatures. The intensifying layers of bird song were a reminder that migration was indeed still happening out of…
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March 2024 birding roundup
Spring slowly arrived over the month, with a trickle of migrants throughout and the odd burst of higher intensity movement. A lot of the action was at Combe Valley CP, which, with water levels remaining reasonably high, becomes a very exciting place to bird at this time of year. Eastward Dark-bellied Brent Goose passage was…
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Gull vismig, Hastings, December 2023
I spent much of my December birding time watching gulls as they drifted along the cliffs in Hastings. There seems to have been a near constant stream moving west here and the process of scouring them for rare species is quite addictive. The first clue that something was happening came in the first week of…
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Storm-Petrels from West Hill, Hastings, 2 November 2023
With Storm Ciarán still making its way east across the south of England, Hastings was pretty wet and windy on the 2nd and by midday I hadn’t yet dared to venture outside. That was until I got a call from David Campbell to say he had just had 3 Leach’s Storm-Petrel past West Hill. Fortunately…
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Migrant fall on West Hill, Hastings, 25 August 2023
I’m lucky to have some great places to witness bird migration on my doorstep in Hastings. One of these is the open parkland of West Hill, a green ridge rising between the two urban sections of Hastings town. The park section is a small area, about 0.1 km2, most of which is open ground frequented…