In the garden this afternoon, a female stonechat, captured here via the magic of holding my iPhone up to a pair of binoculars:
It doesn’t look like much, especially compared to the summer males, which are positively glamorous, but it’s a pretty good sighting for south London and a patch tick for me.
Interestingly a couple of other London birders who are on Twitter also had stonechats today — there was one at Wormwood Scrubs this morning and another at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. So they are obviously passing through at the moment. It’s an unexpected benefit of Twitter, for me, the way it acts as a kind of antenna for bird movements and the changing seasons; I haven’t seen my own first butterfly of the season, but I have seen one on someone else’s twitter feed…
EDIT: and a very handsome male in Regent’s Park, as well.