Jack Snipe and more!

This year, Sjoerd Radstaak, Rutger Wilschut, Mark de Vries and I are doing a national Big Day (see as many species of birds in 24 hours in the Netherlands). The first time for me, so I'm pretty excited. We are planning to 'do' our forest birds in the Maashorst, my former local patch (now I moved). A big day requires some research in advance. As we have planned our route via a lot of known places, most of the research can be done on the internet. The forest species however are more difficult: you have to know exactly where which species has their nest or singing post, or at least a small area where the change is practically 99,9% of encountering the species in 1-2 hours in half May. Today I went to the Maashorst to monitor some difficult species. There were some simple year-list ticks of species that shouldn't be a problem on the big day: Common Redstart, Cuckoo, Pied Flycatcher and Tree Pipit (shame...). As the Common Redstart (Phoenicurus phoenicurus) was singing pretty loud, I made a recording. To bad that in spring there is always a Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) ruining your recording. This one waited untill the Redstart was finished with its strophe. The Redstart is succesfully imitating a Treecreeper!


15 minutes later I found a nest of Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), pretty good one for the big day! Also I heard 3 Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers (Dendrocopos minor), two couples of Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) and found a couple couples Long-tailed Tits (Aegithalos caudatus), a surprisingly difficult bird in May!


The last week, we have had quite some Ring Ouzels (Turdus torquatus) in the Netherlands. The Maashorst had quite a few as wel, with 39 individuals at one time last week! During my walk I bumped into 1, 1, 15, 3 and 11 individuals respectively! The wind was pretty strong, but I managed to make one recording of a calling individual from out of a tree, which provided me the shelter against the wind:


And then the 'highlight' of the (recording part of the) day: I flushed a Jack Snipe (Lymnocryptes minimus) Sometimes, pretty rare actually, Jack Snipes are calling when flushed. This individual did! And, I had my recording gear running!

It is not a good recording, but hey, for the first of waarneming.nl and xeno-canto.org it is not that bad! You first hear wingbeats, then a soft call ('wêh') and than some noise from my bag. Yay!