Sunday 27th June: Roller in Suffolk

 After daily reminders from Jenny that a Eurasian roller was still present in Suffolk I finally made the effort to go to see it and took advantage of the trip to visit several other local sites which were of interest to me. 

My first stop was at the tiny village of Ampton where I normally find my annual tick for tree sparrow and this year was no exception as I saw one within 20 seconds of getting out of my car.  After watching it for a minute or so I quickly moved on to the next venue which was Lackford Lakes, a Suffolk wildlife trust reserve which had been reporting a juvenile glossy ibis for a few days.  I was told by someone in the car park exactly where it had been seen recently but he had not seen it that day when he had walked around earlier.  When I arrived at the hide 3 other birders were there but they had not seen it and so after 10 minutes I gave up waiting for it to show and moved on to try to see the roller.

I had seen a number of birders along the A1101 as I drove past on my way to Ampton earlier so I knew where I had to go and parked in the nearby picnic area car park before walking about half a mile to join the group of birders. There were bushes along the side of the road with several gaps which allowed you to climb up the embankment to the fence surrounding a field.  The roller was clearly visible perched on overhead cables about 50 metres from the fence.  It briefly flew down to the ground a couple of times while I was there but for most of the time it just stayed on the wires.  The light was quite poor as it was an overcast day but of course I took a few photos anyway although I did not manage to get any in flight shots.  It was a shame as there had been some excellent in flight photos on the suffolk bird sightings website which showed off the beautiful colours of the bird.  

I was contemplating whether to visit Cavenham Heath to see if I could see any stone curlews there but the onset of some rain persuaded me to go home instead and I will return there for a proposed visit in September with Jenny and Tim when hopefully there will be many of them gathering there before they all migrate for the winter.