A drizzly start to the day, but it brightened up in the end. From our School Bird Boat this morning, the highlights including 2 Spoonbill seen on the Brownsea lagoon, along with the bustling activity from the Sandwich and Common Terns.

It’s been nice to have some hirundine activity reported today, with small numbers of Swallows and House Martins over Arne, as well as 23 House Martin over Upton Heath. Lows numbers of Swift were also reported over Arne, though it’s a common misconception that Swifts fall into the hirundine family. Swifts instead have their own taxonomic family, Apodidae, of which there is only one species native to the UK. They are not closely related to Swallows and Martins, only being superficially similar rather than genetically; a lovely example of convergent evolution!

We’ve also released a new Osprey blog this morning, with an update about the incubation and identifying the difference in facial markings between 022 and CJ7. You can read the blog here.

Photo of a male Redstart taken on our Morden Bog ID Course yesterday – Andy Collyer

Identification illustrations of CJ7 and 022 from our recent blog