Beddington Farmlands and Mitcham Common, April 22nd 2026

Look who’s back:

This is the earliest I’ve seen swifts in London.  I wasn’t expecting to see them for another couple of weeks, but the skies above Beddington Farmlands were full of them wheeling and screaming.

They’re a bittersweet arrival for a winter-lover like me, but I do like them.  Part of the reason I like them is that they’re so hard to get a decent picture of, being, as you might expect, swift.

Swifts jack-knife through the sky, and getting them in frame is distinctly non-trivial.  My method is always to let the camera get focus, fire a burst for as long as I can hold the frame on them, and hope one of the hundreds of pictures I just took is decent.

This time I got a couple of nice ones.  I like the feather detail on the one above, they’re so smooth they look almost scaly.  It’s things like that which remind you that birds are just dinosaurs with ambition.

And in this one, I like the pose with the outstretched wings, like it’s ascending to heaven:

Standard composition advice for something like this is to put the empty space in the direction the bird is travelling, so it looks like they have somewhere to go.  With this one, I did the opposite - I wanted it to look like the little goth angel was rising, and positioning it toward the top of the frame does that better.

The skies were also full of these guys:

Kestrels are always a great thing to see.  They ignored the swifts completely, rather looking for mice and voles in the scrub.  Nothing that isn’t a hobby has any chance of chasing down a swift anyhow.

The lakes themselves were relatively empty this time, though I did get a good view of a heron flying over the south lake:

And I spent far longer than I should have done chasing a swallow.  For whatever reason I barely see swallows in my bit of London at all, so having one in the crowd of swifts was a nice treat.

What I didn’t get were much in the way of great pictures.  I almost binned this one, but then I spotted that it didn’t just have the swallow, but also the bug it was chasing.  God only knows if you’ll be able to see it, but trust me, it’s there.  Raising the shadows and whites on the swallow and then pushing down the blacks gave the glow through the feathers.

Beddington Farmlands is a good start for a few good walks.  The one I’ll do most often is to turn left through the woods at the end of the reserve, then catch the Wandle trail from Watermead Lane and walk from there up to Morden, but this time I went the other way, to Mitcham Common.

On the way, I found this wren staking a territory claim:

I am, you may have noticed, a sucker for a silhouette.

Mitcham Common is a strange space, huge and empty and entirely out of place for somewhere that’s really still quite a long way inside London.  I walked up from the One Island Pond area, and walked around the pond to find a greenfinch hiding in the branches:

There were also a couple of spots that weren’t birds.

There seem to be terrapins in every pool in South London.  I assume they’re abandoned pets, and probably aren’t great for the ecology since they’ll eat basically anything.

Climbing over the Mill House hill, there was also a native invader:

I see foxes everywhere in London - it’s unusual not to spot at least three just on the way home from the cinema - but usually at night, when I’m not carrying a camera, so seeing one in daylight is an event.  Right now they’ve likely got cubs to feed, so are more likely to be out and about at all hours.

This one stood there and watched me for a couple of minutes, but turned tail when I attempted to get a bit closer.

The final spot of the day was another first for the year:

Whitethroats are summer migrants, just starting to arrive from Africa.  Their song is a complex trill at high speed, mixing short and long phrases, the notes tumbling over the top of each other.  There’s nothing quite like it from the birds which stay here all year, and they (along with the Blackcap) are a major reason why spring and summer have a different soundtrack to autumn and winter.

Almost makes summer worth looking forward to.