An exceedingly pleasant day's bird watching

After being out at the Essex coast yesterday we returned home to discover that no more than a mile off our route there was a Rough-legged Buzzard reported - never seen one of those.

Mrs L had other plans, so today it was just RCB and me. We started out at Abberton Reservoir but after chatting with another couple of birders it became apparent that the best viewing point given the distance and the sun would be from School Lane in Stafford's Corner, a narrow lane with few parking opportunities.

There was already one car in the prime spot, but room for a couple of others, at least that's how it looked before IRCB dropped the car into a rather large hole. An interesting entrance!, but I managed to extricate it undamaged. We then spent probably a good hour and a half watching the bird. There was various rumours as to how many Rough-legs were around and with the addition of a further four birders the consensus was that there actually was only one Rough-legged Buzzard, four Common Buzzards, one Marsh Harrier, one Peregrine and three Kestrels.

The above photo is actually my best shot of the bird!! RCB has it with eight other shots all at pixel level that show the distinctive features of a Rough-legged Buzzard - honestly.