This week it was Nick Watmough’s turn to select his PotW. This is his very engaging commentary on the photo submissions to the Bird News page.

“Let me get two things out of the way from the outset. Firstly, Rupert Kirkwood appears not to have launched his kayak last week! Second, the subject of POTW is not a first summer male Red-footed Falcon! Many of the county’s finest photographers made the trip either Bray’s Cott (Lizard) or Gurland Farm (Nanquidno) to see these super little visitors from eastern Europe and the quality of submissions was extremely high. So much so that I didn’t bother trying to clog up the county recorder’s hard drive with my own efforts. Congratulations to Sarah-Jane Eastman, John St Ledger, Adrian Lea, Adrian Langdon, Tony Mills, Nigel Rogers and Simon Willson for sharing their experiences of these delightful birds. But a particular shout out to Alex Mckechnie for his beautifully lit portrait of one of the Nanquidno birds feasting on an earthworm.

Away from the falcons there were some technically excellent contributions this week. Stand outs were Jon Irvine’s summer plumage Sanderling on Gyllyngvase beach in Falmouth, Adrian Lea’s pair of images of a showy Grasshopper Warbler, Martin Webb’s Great Crested Grebe from Drift, Alistair Swanson’s Skylark from Minions and Adrian Langdon’s series of Red Kites hunting over a recently cut field at Chapel Carn Brea.

All these contributions set the bar very high , but the response from Adam Holme’s was along lines of “hold my beer”! Even using a well set up camera equipped with AI enabled autofocus photographing Sand Martins in flight is difficult. However, Adam seems to have cracked it – I don’t know how many memory cards were filled during his session at Gwithian on Sunday to yield the two outstanding images he submitted but they were certainly worth the effort! Pin sharp and perfectly exposed against a neutral background makes them a worthy winner of POTW. It was genuinely hard to pick my favourite

Thanks to all the above for sharing their work as well those contributors I didn’t have space to mention. Without your generosity the Sightings Page would be a much less interesting read”

Congratulations to Adam, on his first win this year and thanks to Nick for writing this weeks review.