The “Awesome Foursome” at Telford Gardens, Kowloon Bay

The flowerbeds and planters of Telford Gardens have been host to an exotic variety of migrant birds through October 2020. Consider: -

Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler

Lanceolated Warbler

Pallas’s Grasshopper Warbler

Pale-footed Bush Warbler

All these birds have been very viewable due to the limited size of the flower beds they are stopping-over in.  

Rare birds have been found and Telford Gardens before Braving the Concrete Jungle (in early 2017).

This Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler was only the third HK bird to be detected other than by the bird ringers in their Mai Po reedbed nets.

So it drew a sizeable (socially distanced ?) crowd of admirers, including yours truly.

Captain Wong (Wong Lun-cheung), who found many of these rarities, has lived at this estate in east Kowloon for a decade and back in the summer (of 2020) wrote up an account of this phenomenon for the HKBWS’s quarterly bulletin number 256. 

The birds get so used to people they can be photographed with mobile phones, which certainly democratises the recording process; -

Telford Gardens Estate Management has been both informative with the signboards, and responsive to control the human movement around the flowerbeds.

So it’s a “win” for the birds, and a “win” for the humans, too.

Elsewhere, a view of Collared Scops Owl, seen on our nightbird survey on 22nd October. 

And, on 26th October, a sunny morning at Mai Po’s boardwalk hide, with a falling tide.  Wigeon are among the first duck to arrive for the winter.  

"Also seens" were Pacific Golden Plover, “atrifrons” Lesser Sand Plover, and Osprey.  

Dunlin are also winter visitors…

Cool weather now, but strangely, there’s a big Typhoon in the Philippines, heading for the South China Sea.