You may be wondering what is with the title of this blog post 🙂 . Well that is exactly what I expressed when I heard of a sighting of the Sedge Warbler in Kerala. I had never heard of this bird before and it was even more surprising that was visiting India. But that is what happened.

News had come in some birding WhatsApp group of the sighting of a Sedge Warbler in Kannur, a city in the northern part of Kerala, India. And the sighting was big! It is considered a vagrant to India and this was considered one of the very few reports, if not the first one. So you can imagine the attention it was getting.

A few of us (Dhanapal, Albin, Manjula, Arya and I) decided to try and and see it. Kannur was around 7 hours drive from Bangalore. We want to try for the bird during a morning session. So we left for Kannur in the afternoon from Bangalore. On the way, as we were going through the recent eBird checklists submitted for place, there were also reports of potentially an additional rarity. Seeing it, we all got worked up 😀 .

Once in the hotel room, I spent a lot of time going through the various articles, photos and calls of the Sedge Warbler as well as the possible other rarity. Well, we hoped for the best for the following morning.

Come morning, we started from the hotel by around 5:30am. Albin had contacted a local birder who readily agreed to show us the spot. We rendezvoused with him at a tea stall enroute. At the bird spot itself, we were the first ones to reach. Being a weekend, it was expected that lots of birders would come in an attempt to see the celebrity. Now it was a matter of wait and watch.

There were plenty of warblers around to get us all excited and confused; Paddyfield Warbler, Booted Warbler, Blyth’s Reed Warbler, Sykes’s Warbler, Clamorous Reed Warbler! There was even a Pallas’s Grasshopper Warbler. But thankfully that kept to the other side of the wetland and only occasionally called. The Sedge Warbler finally showed up in its usual patch around 30 minutes into the session 🙂 .

We spend a good amount of time observing the bird for more than a hour in the session. Here are some photos of it:

The whole place was a good wetland. Here are some of the other birds that we saw during the morning and evening sessions on that day:

Baillon’s Crake
Watercock
Temminck’s Stint
Little Stint
Pacific Golden Plover
Lesser Whistling Ducks, Garganey
Common Sandpiper
Black Bittern
Wire-tailed Swallow
Common Snipe

Video

Here is a short video of the Sedge Warbler in action:

Here is a short video of some of the others that we saw:

Want to know about my other “twitching” trips? Check out Twitching a Pectoral Sandpiper, Twitching a Whinchat and Meet with a Lesser Noddy.

Have you twitched as well? Let me know your experiences as comments to this post.