May is the birdwatcher's favourite month, when our summer visitors, the males in particular, look as bright and smart as they do in the field guides. The Common Redstart, a migrant which I occasionally encounter on local walks in early May, is a striking mixture of reds, blacks and ash-greys, its fiery, orange tail shivering as it perches on a fence post. Then there are the Warblers, arriving one by one, like members of an opera company, setting up their favourite positions to sing from.I have always kept bird records, so can look back on some special May days since moving to Wiltshire. A startling example was a day in May 1984 when I encountered a "trip" (group) of three Dotterel on Hackpen Hill. The Dotterel is a rare wader which breeds in the Highlands of Scotland on sparse vegetation above 1,000 metres: my birds were so confiding and tame I was able to approach to within a few feet and hear their twittering calls as they circled overhead. A few years later another rare wader appeared on a patch of water near Collingbourne Ducis: a Black-winged Stilt, with immaculate black and white plumage and ridiculously long, bright red legs. Exceptionally rare for Wiltshire, it must have attracted a fair number of "twitchers" during its five-day stay. I look back on some records with mixed feelings. I see that at dusk in May 1998 I was listening to two Nightjars "churring" and a Woodcock "roding" overhead in a copse near Great Bedwyn. A beautiful newly-born deer, no bigger than a hare, was lying silently by my feet, while I gripped my dog by the collar. I don't know about the current population of fallow deer in Savernake, but the copse is silent now at dusk in May, apart from the occasional sounds of hooting Tawny Owls.A local friend organises an annual Dawn Chorus walk, starting at his farm in Berwick Bassett and then continuing from Avebury up to Windmill Hill. We usually manage to log c.40 species, and that has included Grey Partridge, Quail, Yellow Wagtail and Whinchat. With my Swindon Choir we raised a tidy sum on a Sponsored Birdwatch Day in the Water Park in May 2019.One balmy May night I remember stopping by the Marlborough College Lakes after a social event and hearing, for the first and only time there, a Nightingale in full song. A colleague met me later, didn't believe me, and assured me that I'd been drinking. He may have had a point!
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