Spoonbill September

I've been to the coast twice over the past eight days, first to Nieuwpoort last weekend together with a couple of visiting birders.  We saw three Spoonbill and several Little Egrets on the estuary there, with a nice little fall of migrants providing a Whinchat and Stonechat perched side by side for comparison.  We also had a late Turtle Dove in flight and got great views of a female Firecrest having tracked her calls through the bushes for a good 20 minutes or so.  The day before yesterday, I took another visitor to Uitkerkse Polder, having started early with a few hours on the edge of the forest in Brussels.  The polders themselves were very quiet and exceptionally dry, one of the most productive ponds now being a flowering mass of Michaelmas Daisies instead!  It was a good day for Spoonbill migration, however, as we had two groups of around 50 and 30 birds within 15 minutes of each other, plus this lone juvenile feeding succesfully in front of one of the hides.  We didn't do too badly for raptors either, seeing Kestrel, Buzzard, two Marsh Harriers, a Peregrine and two Sparrowhawks, one of which we watched trying to catch a Goldfinch.  It was a long day but the combination of forest in Brussels and coast produced a day list of 67 species, which is not bad considering most of the breeding shorebirds had gone and the only geese to have arrived were a flock of around 70 Barnacles.