Two patch ticks in an hour!

My day started (05.00hrs) with me having to arrange an "emergency days' holiday" - Bev's latest hospital visit and procedure leaving her rather poorly. I was over to work and home again in less than forty minutes - job done! I left Bev sleeping and took a coffee into the garden to watch the dawn. Almost the first bird over the garden was a Kestrel and a male Blackcap was flicking around in the buddlieas. Overhead was clear, yet there was a low lying mist and the garden was heavy with dew.
Nothing much else happened and I went back inside to do some toast; leaving the kitchen door open just in case anything should cause the gulls to get excited. I could hear odd Meadow Pipits passing and a juvenile Sparrowhawk ghosted over the gardens - Blue Tits and Robins sounding the alarm. And that was about it until the sun burned through and the heat intensified; the first Common Buzzard drifted north - north-east at 10.45hrs and was the start of a rather hectic ninety minutes. I checked that Bev was OK before heading off for a quick circuit of the farm.

The first of, at least 9 - possibly 13, Common Buzzards that I recorded over
Newland's Farm today

Wheatear on the piled earth beside the new excavations at Ellington Girls School

Six Wheatears were around the excavations at Ellington Girls School - allowing a nice series of images as they fed on Crane-flies on the earthen mounds. I decided to check the stubble and was about a third of the way across the field when the gulls went up. Four more Common Buzzards were spiralling to the south - I rang Gadget who was already watching them from his garden! I continued on past the "White House" and flushed a Grasshopper Warbler from some rank vegetation beside the footpath - it flew straight into the caulis! I managed to kick it for a second time, getting a 10 second view through my bins before it dived back into the cauliflower field (all 150 acres) never to be seen again. Not quite what I'd hoped - but a patch tick all the same. Why couldn't I have discovered it out in the stubble, as we used to at Bockhill in 1999/2000?
Two more Wheatears were backed up by a couple of single Buzzards before I discovered a group of five thermalling over Broadstairs, some distance to the north. It was proving to be a good morning. I checked out a few other areas, with little result, before returning home. I made it out into the back garden, ringing Gadget to see if he'd had any more buzzards? As I was doing so three more appeared over the garden, however, all was not as it first appeared - one of them was an Osprey! The second patch tick of the morning.

High up in the murky haze, in the company of two Common Buzzards.
One of those regular Thanet visitors that had avoided detection on my patch for
fourteen years. It's in the bag now!

Another two Sparrowhawks, a trickle of Swallows plus the occasional flurry of Meadow Pipits and a bonus Grey Wagtail - it turned out to be a very fortuitous and eventful "emergency holiday" - very happy at how things turned out and Bev's feeling better as well.

More of the same - a great day to be on holiday