Though I see a lot of very fine birds during the hours I spend walking in Nature, I don’t often find them myself – I have usually heard about them through my WhatsApp group or my contacts on social media – so there is something especially rewarding and satisfying about finding a special bird myself.

And that’s what happened twice during my recent week in East Sussex, the same bird species both times. The birds were Dartford warblers (Curruca undata), and I found the first in scrub below the former lighthouse at Belle Tout.

These birds are frequently found in the company of Stonechats and often seen perching on the tops of Gorse bushes. Both Stonechats and Gorse were abundant in the area of scrub where I was walking, and I had just been thinking that, given how many Stonechats there were and how much Gorse, there really should be a Dartford warbler, when … boom! I heard its distinctive call from the bushes down the slope from where I was standing, and then up it popped.

These warblers are notorious for skulking in bushes, frustrating bird watchers by their teasing behaviour, giving tantalisingly brief views before disappearing for long periods into the undergrowth (and that’s exactly what happened when I spotted my second Dartford warbler of the trip at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve a couple of days later; blog about Rye to follow).

So, I was exceedingly lucky that this first Dartford warbler showed well for me. I even saw it interacting with other birds, first with the Stonechats and then, as you can see from my sequence of three photos here, with a male Blackcap that was probably about to head off on its migration journey.

Dartford warblers themselves don’t migrate but they do often disperse from their breeding locations during the autumn, and this is probably what was happening with the two I saw, as they are not usually seen in the locations where I found them. As you can imagine, I was over the moon with my special finds.