Pots of gold

No rainbows today but I did manage to connect with the pot of gold that remained hidden last time; a group of Dotterels! 
Numbers in this particular field in Flemish Brabant had been building up to a maximum count of 34 during the rainy weather of the past few days but today was my first chance to go there.  It also happened to be the first morning with clear skies so I was worried they may have left on the next step of their migration before I got there.  Sure enough, I arrived at the location to see no other birders at all, which is not a good sign.  Still, I began scanning and rescanning and turned up four Wheatears but nothing else.  I thus decided to to do a big loop of the field and eventually saw several other birders, none of whom stopped for more than five minutes.  The signs were not good at all.  I even convinced myself I heard them at one point but the faint calls were actually coming from an extremely distant parakeet in the nearest village!  Furthermore, the loop turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, taking me well away from the original spot so that, after an hour and a half of searching, I'd still not even circumnavigated the entire field but had already given up and decided to head home.  Just as I sped up, however, I caught a movement of something running in the field out of the corner of my eye, and got on it straight away to find a Dotterel, then another, then another!  After a quick scan, I'd first counted eight, but then I looked up the slope and found more; now there were 16 of them.  At this point, several Skylarks flew up from my feet so I briefly took my eyes of the Dotterels but then looked back only to find they had gone.  I was sure they hadn't flown off as I thought I would have noticed that but they were nowhere to be seen despite repeated scans of the same area.  I stayed put, though, hearing a Tawny Pipit, a scarce migrant in Belgium, passing over, and getting a good view of this juvenile Hen Harrier.  The photo isn't great but it does show the typical bulging arm and five-fingered wingtip which help differentiate this species from the other harriers in flight.

Suddenly, after half an hour, the Dotterels were there again, all sixteen of them, in exactly the same spot!  I was starting to believe Dotterels used the same teleporters that antpittas use in the Amazon to move around the forest without being seen when the mystery unravelled itself.  One by one, the birds crouched down, blending in so well with the mud and stubble, that they disappeared before my very eyes.  I knew where they were and was looking right at them but I could no longer see them.  Now that is what I call camouflage!  I waited another ten minutes or so, but again, they remained invisible as they weren't moving, so I left them to it, very pleased at having located them and adding another species to my Belgian list.  None of the other birders even bothered to check that end of the field as they'd not been seen there before so I was the only one to see them today.  Here is a very heavily cropped photo of two of them; for some real Dotterel pictures, have a look at these taken by a Polish birder last week.

Somewhere under the rainbow

I tried twitching some Dotterel yesterday as it is peak time for their migration and various groups have been turning up in Wallonia, with this one particular area on the border between the provinces of Hainaut and Namur having one to five birds for the past ten days or so.  Unfortunately, the weather made it virtually impossible to locate them, although it did provide some nice views as you can see above.  At one point, I thought I heard their calls, but they are virtually impossible to find amongst the stubble unless they happen to fly and I'd underestimated just how much suitable habitat there was for them to hide in.  I did get a nice, second-year male Hen Harrier hunting as a consolation prize, though, and there were lots of Whinchats and Yellow Wagtails around, with a few Yellow-legged Gulls amongst a large flock of Lesser Black-backs.
As there wasn't much other than rainbows to take pictures of, here's another insect from my last day out butterflying near Liège.  The Dutch call this the 'pyjama bug', which is so much better than the English name of Striped Shield Bug.

More summer blues

This summer's blue theme continued during a walk in the south-east of Brussels earlier this week with this Common Blue posing nicely.  I was surprised to find two Firecrests, a species which is primarily a passage migrant and winter visitor here.  In fact, the only time I've ever seen them in June, July or August was down in Belgian Luxembourg, their breeding stronghold, so seeing two here now is a good indication that they may have bred within Brussels this year.  Another rare breeding species for Brussels, this Little Grebe and its partner were busy feeding two young chicks.

  
The biggest surprise of the day, however, came in the form of a large, unidentified bat foraging for insects in broad daylight.
Today, I visited a nature reserve near Liège for Chalk-hill Blue butterfly (below).  I had noticed that this particular reserve held a thriving colony of this species, which I have never seen, so I decided to give it a try.  I must have seen around 100 individuals, many of which were in a mating frenzy, with several males swarming around each female.  The Dutch name translates as 'pale blue', which is quite appropriate as it looks almost ghost-like in flight, quite unlike the other blues.  I saw 20 species of butterfly in total, including a bonus, new species for me, a Dingy Skipper.