I was in the car park field 09:00 (where else would I be!), with Brian admiring our Redstart and we decided to view the landfill, nothing showing, but Brian got onto a medium sized wader, dropping quickly towards the NE corner of LFGP, I barely got anything on it, but it looked big enough to be interesting, so said "we'd better go and check that it wasn't a Spot Shank, or something".
As we walked back quickly to the car, I brought up my memorable dash to LFGP on 5th November 2009 for a Great White Egret I'd seen from Bittern Hide and I was saying "shame it didn't stay....". I drove us down the other end and we marched quickly down to Ron's hide, opening the flaps we both looked to the SW corner, no waders, but panning, I picked up an egret just circling above and to the right of the Oak behind the Sand Martin wall.
It turned and I could see it was way too big for Little, clocking that it had a deep neck bulge, big long wings and long trailing dark looking legs, it was indeed a Great White Egret. Sadly against the bright, slightly misty light it was impossible to age, but regardless it continued deep slow flaps as it headed towards the NE corner at about 50 feet, just for a moment looked like it would glide to land at the lake edge, but it wasn't to be and it kept flapping and on it went round the back of Lodge Wood and out of sight.
After a 20-30 minute search at the North end of Lodge Wood Lake, where the shallows are, we could not relocate it.
Also present at LFGP were 2 Green Sandpiper and a Snipe, but I don't think the wader we saw was a Snipe, so we'll never know what that was, oh well I can live with that after finding my second Great White Egret here in 4 years, talk about "talk of the devil"
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