Stonechat's a century

The BTO reserve has been covered like never before in the past week or so as The Lodgers piled on the pressure by picking off a few easy summer migrants, culminating in them sneaking up to the 100 mark ahead of us. Still no Sand Martin or Blackcap here (despite some of us spending 6 hours on the reserve yesterday for a ringing course!) but Dawn Balmer came up trumps with something far less predictable in Nunnery Lakes terms today in the form of a fine male Stonechat. (Bad luck to dedicated nest-recorders Mike Toms and Dave Leech who texted me thinking that this good 'find' during a nest-checking visit to the reserve was theirs, only to get the frustrating news that they'd been beaten to it!).

Edit: Turns out its bad luck to Dawn too... Ian Henderson was first out of the blocks with the Stonechat, finding it on Saturday - its getting pretty tough to find your own birds down the Lakes this year!

Better even than Stonechat was Ian's fly-over Marsh Harrier, also on Saturday, whilst Andy Musgrove sorted out Blackcap for the year in the Nunnery grounds on Monday morning, taking the total to 102.