Morelarks?

There’s a paradox involved with Norfolk birding. Simultaneously it manages to be both heaven and hell, as I discovered once again at Holkham. Down in the gap, reddish saltings and weak winter sunshine stretched off into the horizon, bracketed by dunes and contrasted with the dark, brooding presence of Holkham pines. 5, 10 and then up to 14 Shorelarks were showing in the dunes, saltings and fringe vegetation. At point blank range, this flock of one of the best species ever, crawled, shuffled and ran towards me in perfect light.

And Norfolk is hell.
Hysterical dog owners letting their privileged pooches run amok through pipit flocks, brightly clothed walkers shouting at people only a metre away and walking between the Shorelarks and me. And a fact so horrendous my brain refuses to acknowledge it.

I didn’t have my camera.

Only videoscoping with the compact.


All thoughts of ageing and sexing go out the window- my brain turned to sludge, tongue hanging out, just ogling the sheer beauty and charisma of the species. Everybody knows that larks are essentially variations on brown and grey streaking. Shorelark are a cut above though; they’re smoother, cleaner and more smartly streaked and have that exotic bandit mask on yellow face.

And I didn’t take my camera. And it hurts. A lot.

Thousands of scoter swirled off shore, a ticker tape flock of black ducks that perspective shredded in the offshore wind farms. 3 Red-breasted Mergansers lurked looking like the disreputable cousins of Goosander, whilst Red-throated Divers achieved the precise count of “plentiful”. The gloomy pines were typically bird free and walker busy, whilst the grazing marsh by Lady Anne’s drive held a large flock of bean-less Pink-feet Geese.

A race against the light ensued- to get to Dersingham bog before dusk did. Already the light had lost the spirit of earlier and was gradually succumbing to clouds. Dersingham works well in low light levels though; it feels vaguely prehistoric with the amounts of silver birch and bracken, enhanced by darker skies and shadow. A Great Grey Shrike (ably located by Daniel Trim) perched on the exposed branches of a tree, butchering a vole in its larder with morbid intent. To normal people this is quite grim, to me it was fascinating to see the classic, text book shrike behaviour with something more then a bee.

Do they do Darwin awards for Chaffinches?

bRambling (14-15/11/09)

“Strongest winds of the year, batter southern England…” Said the media. As they do every year with the same sentence in the same conditions. It’s always a let down. Admittedly the weather was awful- unremitting Payne’s grey clouds hung with the threat of rain over bronzed Beech trees, whilst wind whipped through the cracks in the regimented conifer stands, depositing deciduous leaves and beech mast on the floor.
Orange on green.
Weather like this remains resolutely refreshing, blasting out the cobwebs of a slightly too-late night before. It serves to petrify the dog walking classes who paid attention to the media and stayed away from the danger of trees blowing over and being drowned by gale force rain. Clearly the most sensible thing to be doing was to be wandering around Thetford forest for finches…

Bramblings. Forced by the weather into the denuded branches of a sheltered Hawthorn thicket, the puffed out white breast catches the eye first. Steadily increasing the magnification reveals the subtle details, the orange back and flanks, the grey head with the black detailing. Dark skies filter the colour, until they glow with beacon like intensity out of the dark light.
They flit from bush to bush, but mostly they sit, preen and stare at the rain. It’s hard to guess at numbers, certainly not the several hundred reported of the week before, certainly the biggest flock I’ve ever seen. I’m not mathematical; numbers barely mean anything to me (statistics even less) so I leave it in the upper double figures. A monster of a flock.

The day after prompted a return. Clear and sunny skies with the decided drop in wind speeds brought out the dog walkers and fair weather picnic fans to gaze upon the devastation, of all those leaves, wrecked by the winds…
Released from the rain, the Brambling flock were free to explore the rest of Santon Downham, this time rightfully in the Beech trees and on the beech mast. This meant the flock were a lot flightier and thus were hard to get good views of. Even harder to enjoy when you have to move to let a dog walker pass every 5 minutes. Nuthatches bubbled away in the dead trees lining the Little Ouse whilst 2 Moorhens rafted downstream on a log. Interesting, but not exciting like yesterday.

Dad and I scarpered to Lynford Arboretum, in the hope of a decent bird away from dog walkers. Nonchalantly I strolled down the track, thermos in hand, bins in the other to where dad had located a Hawfinch, typically distant in the Hornbeams. It’d been a while, over a year in fact. But somehow I’d forgotten the true scale of that cherry-stone crushing, mechanical mouth. Ignore the greyish tan plumage; just zoom in on that pneumatic bill. It only appears briefly before disappearing into the depths of the forest, leaving the Hornbeam branches to a flock of very smart Redwings, illuminated to blood red in the early evening sun.

Small victories, finding pleasure in every bird, is a patch mentality sneaking in? Or just a by-product of my mostly bird-less autumn peregrinations?

Σιγμα (29-30/10/09)

After several years of accidently spending what I was meant to be saving, I finally raised enough to get a new lens! The Sigma 120-400mm it was to be, picked up at the extraordinary Warehouse Express shop in Norwich. Due to my post-H1N1 lungs still being sub-par in the performance stakes, asthma inducing long walks were out of the question. So Titchwell seemed a good idea…
As always Titchwell was never as enjoyable as it should be. A beautiful ringtail Hen Harrier over Thornham salt marsh whilst everybody else was staring the wrong way was mildly amusing; several Eiders off shore included an absolutely glorious drake and the Ruff flock included one satellite male. It did succeed in its purpose though, providing lots of close subjects for the new lens and the walk didn’t kill me. To summarize the Titchwell experience, as I left the visitor centre there were 20+ plus people all intently staring up at the sky being talked through an identification. As we were away from the Thames basin it couldn’t have been an Eleonora’s Falcon, but I joined the crowds anyway. It was a Marsh Harrier. This is normally the time when in most birding blogs, the writer launches into a vitriolic attack of all things ‘Dudewell’ and RSPB. I can’t be bothered with that. The more people who visit here and see the awe-inspiring elegance and power of a Marsh Harrier quartering a reed bed, the more potential new RSPB members there are. Regardless of your views on the RSPB the only reason that Marsh Harriers are here is because of them and the only reason the RSPB are here is because of ever increasing support from new members. So I won’t moan about it, if you don’t like it, don’t go. I’m not especially a fan of crowds and Titchwell, but it does have its uses.














Choseley was very peaceful. Binoculars were optional. Dusk at Lynford Arboretum produced my first Brambling of the autumn and some flyover Crossbills.

Bawdsey- home to the invention of radar and Firecrests. 7 of them. 1 Firecrest looks like luck, 2 a nice haul and 3 is enough for one year. But 7! I’m not one to twitch a Firecrest, despite their status as the best breeding passerine in England, but 7 was just too great an attraction to pass up. After an hour of poking around the dense vegetation of Bawdsey car park, one eventually showed well and proves that they’re impossible to photograph.







East lane = nothing
Shingle Street = 100+ Greenfinch flock, on the beach.
Boyton Marsh = 1 Blackwit…
That bad.
Unlike my new lens, stopped down to F8 it both feels and behaves at a whole new level of performance. When the birding is quiet I can use it for weightlifting as well…

Bushes, Robins and Bush Robins

Kid-unlister. That’s what I am, blithely ignoring Staines and its Brown Shrike carnival to go twitch a year tick at, dare I say it, Minsmere of all places…

“A flash of cobalt blue pricked my interest. I refocus my bins and pan down through several bushes until movement catches my eye, a small bird shuffling through the undergrowth. A small bird that happens to have a pronounced white eye-ring and an orange stain on an otherwise uniformly brown body. It flits off just as my brain computes these features and I call it out to the crowd of twitchers. That was no Dunnock.”

Piecemeal views over an hour, slowly pieced together the glaringly obvious, but hyperactive Asian chats, dark environments and a bustling crowd of twitchers don’t exactly lend to an easy identification. Eventually a behavioural pattern becomes apparent, it flits through the hedge row, always on its own and never higher then 2ft off the ground. Staying still, crouching or on your knees becomes the method of the day and an hour after those first snatched, shaky views through several bushes, I finally score good views. The crowd having dissipated away with a lack of patience finally gives me freedom over where to stand. Then a bird flits out onto a small vein of grass between two hedges, I raised my bins in a knee-jerk reaction and my heart starts thudding. ‘Dad’ came the strangled cry from my lips, as my eyes took in the fat orange splodge on the flanks and shivering blue tail before it instantly flits back into the undergrowth. Normally this meant the end of viewing but instead of diving behind the thickly tangled bushes it creeps through a clearer patch of undergrowth enabling good but brief to be had by all, including the people crowding up behind me. Fantastic. Even though Red-flanked Bluetail/Orange-flanked Bush Robin/Blauwstaart (whatever your nomenclature of choice is) isn’t the mega it once was (40 out of 60 records in the last decade), I do have a tendency to drown in my own hyperbole about them. So I’ll stop there. Time to emerge back into daylight and head at a tangent to the wind, to stare at the sea.

It was during this cursory 10-minute glance at the sea that the morning went slightly surreal. A stiff northerly breeze is sliced up by gulls, hanging in the breeze and then shearing along the crest of the large grey rolling waves, largely for what looked like the sheer fun of it. Pleasant but not great, until dad cut the atmosphere in a second, whispering ‘Steve… I’ve got two ducks going left, get on them’ with a sense of urgency. Scanning right, I pick them up easily, two black ducks, scoters, but with white on them. Barely daring to hope I reached for the scope, tussle with legs and marram grass before shakily scanning out to sea. I pick them up again instantly and almost directly out in front of me. Male and female scoters with white secondaries… Velvet! I forcibly shoved the scope in front of dad who watches them fly off north before concurring with the id. To ‘normal’ sea watchers that’s merely a decent bird, to those allergic to more than 20 mins of watching birdless waves (those being me), this tarts tick verging on mythical blocker was finally unblocked and straight from seeing a Bluetail! Relatively pleased was an understatement and I even allowed myself a moment’s happiness before reverting back to type solemnity.

Seawatching wasn’t going to get better then that and neither did the rest of the day. It was the long dark anti-climax of the post twitch. Which is one of my problems with twitching, it does tend to screw up the day a bit. Normally I’d have been happy with the rest of the day, a nice walk between Dunwich heath and Island Mere with 2 Bewick’s Swans and a large flock of Lesser Redpolls. Yet as nice as they are, they lacked the wow of the morning. Shame. There was also a general lack of migrants, other then several Robins in every bush. Skulking and thus moderately annoying with a wider repertoire of call then I’m used to. Obviously that makes them continental and probably a UK4000 tick…

Universally Birding#2 (2-4/10/09)

Another Friday, another open day, this time it was to be Exeter at Falmouth, in Penryn. Last time I did this trip west it was in February and I was disappointed to go without any Red Kites. This time, two of the slender winged and surprisingly effeminate raptors were just west of Reading. J. A. Baker in his poetic classic, ‘The Peregrine’ describes the difference between a flying Peregrine and Kestrel being the formers ‘greater zest for flight’. The exact same difference is with Kites and Buzzards. But whilst Milvus milvus maybe the most thrilling raptor native to Britain, these midlands introduced drive-by-at-70 birds don’t do it for me, neither did the one over Peterborough service station or over the A1 in Yorkshire last weekend. With such a beautiful and elegant bird the location must match it in romance, give me one in off , over the Suffolk coast, or soaring over a Welsh valley any day.

Chew Valley Lake made a good stop off on the way down, neatly half way on the journey, close enough to lunch time and was holding a Long-billed Dowitcher and Ferruginous Duck. Not really knowing anything about the place we arrived at Herriots bridge, jumped out the car, headed to the one birder who had the dowitcher on a muddy spit. Instant twitch success. That was the best thing and although dowitchers do give rise to one of the biggest id headaches going, that doesn’t stop them being totally and utterly dull. Size and shape of a Snipe, plumage in the vague theme of ‘godwit’ and lacking the character of both those species, a quick look at the tertials and study of the plumage had me in search of more interesting birds. Like the Kingfisher stuck on the end of an outstretched bough, just out of safe digiscoping range or the Water Rail, creeping past a Moorhen in the shadows of the reedy fringe. 3 good birds for 30 minutes standing still by a road in Somerset.

Out of blind hope rather then any real expectation I scan the distant massed ranks of Aythya ducks for the Ferruginous. I don’t pick it out, but instead a different ferrous duck- Ruddy to be precise. Ruddy Duck! Absolutely nothing to be excited about, but I haven’t seen one for several years, DEFRA having heroically saved my local birds from even thinking of flying to Spain to muddy up some gene pools. (Good thing.)

With 20 minutes left, we drive around to Herons Green Bay for a quick scan for the Ferruginous. I was relatively confident before arrival, but upon my first scan of the bay, revealing 3 to 4 times the amount of Aythya ducks, spread out in one huge line of roosting individuals, with scattered active flocks stretching out into the bay. A quick glance with the bins reveals a reddish duck that transforms into a lovely Widgeon at 60x. Not even an Aythya. I start systematically scanning, initially slowly then with broader more careless sweeps as time made its self felt. 6,5,4 minutes left… not quite as Hollywood as my last minute March Goshawk, but I pick up a smaller darker duck, it disappears behind a Pochard as I zoom in, I wait a tense moment and then it swims out again, more brown then ferrous, but white eye and white UTC’s and ever so slightly closer then the last one I saw. But that’s all quite meaningless to you; just remember that Ferruginous Ducks are the world’s best duck.

24 hours later. After a busy morning rushing around the Falmouth university campus in frankly what can only be described as ‘ass yw euthek an gewer’ or if you haven’t just discovered a website of Cornish phrases, awful weather. Having a whole afternoon off it was time to aim the car at Nanquidno, a Cornish valley in West Penwith.

A lone Buzzard perched up on a telegraph pole by the road, guarding the entrance to the hedge-lined valley. The habitat starts at the car park, surreally giant hogweed contrasts with lines of gently rusting sycamores. In deep bracken and gorse a stream burbles away, nearly invisible due to the profusion of vegetation. The hedgerow the bird is in is also brilliant. A tangled mass of brambles, hawthorns and other such botanical things I can’t identify that at certain times must be crawling with birds. Not today, a few Chaffinches and contrary to a negative text earlier, one very grey Woodchat Shrike dispatching a bee. Now Shrikes are generally a fantastic family, but this one wasn’t the best looking. Still it has character and draws a crowd of mobbing Great Tits and Chaffinches.


After an hour you’ve pretty much exhausted all there is to see from it, so with the wind whipping through the valley we elect on a sea watch. Half way down to the sea and I can see Gannets with my bare eyes and Shags were congregating just off the boiling surf. Walking to the top of the cliffs produces an amazing panorama, big granite cliffs being pounded by Atlantic rollers, white surf and a ribbon of paler blue amongst the unrelenting dark bluish grey. Offshore a small islet and a lighthouse puncture the strange, faintly yellow grey light. A trip up to the top of the cliffs was unrewarding, a couple of Raven, 3 Buzzards and a single obs gropper for my dad was about it*. At the top of the cliff, whilst messing about with lenses I re-learnt lessons about falling into gorse and why its painful. Unfortunately nothing other then Gannets passes out to sea.



At the bottom it starts to spit with rain and big black clouds start to build up with streaks of light shining through the breaks. It’s rather spectacular, I quickly switch lenses and dad taps me on the shoulder. What? “There’s a fin.” What! Having never seen any form of cetacean ever, or rather, anything whilst sea watching this was seriously exciting. A group of gulls skittishly dance across the waves when a dark grey fin just breaks the surface of the wave, followed by another fin about 6 ft back. Instant shock mutates into hurried thoughts with one purpose: nailing as many features as possible. Dolphin? Porpoise? No… Wracking my memory, it physically can’t be one. These two fins are part of the same creature that never comes up for air, sluggishly moves with the waves, not swimming with the speed or vigour of a cetacean and with a vertical tail fin. Realisation slowly dawns, fish, Cornwall, big… Basking Shark? Isn’t it a bit late and close in for that? Google emphatically says no. Basking Shark! World’s second biggest species of fish. Who said birding was just about birds?

On the way back, Dad and I have a poke around some ‘urban’ birding areas in Falmouth. Swanpool comes up trumps with a Gannet off shore and a Med Gull, roosting with the black-heads in the car park. I shouldn’t own up to this being my first Med Gull of the year probably, but in the soft dying light it glows from amongst the other gulls. One of only about 5 interesting gulls in the world…

The day after produced upwards of 20 Red Kites between Didcot and Reading from the M4.
Oh the exciting life...

...of the service station McMallard.
*Oh there were the ugliest cows I’d ever seen. See here http://www.savepenwithmoors.com/ for why some people have too much time on their hands, think cows are evil and Cornwall is better without Choughs...

Universally Birding #1 (25-27/09/09)

South Yorkshire is grey. It’s the inescapable conclusion; I’ve been up or through it about 4 times this year and each time it has been overcast and fairly horrible. This time, at 3:30 on an overcast and ‘fresh’ Friday afternoon, I was just south of the industrial sprawl of Doncaster at Potteric Carr, a Wildlife Trust reserve in the theme of Blashford Lakes but surrounded by busy roads and laced with a railway junction. I wasn’t bunking school, merely taking a detour on the way up to Edinburgh for the university open day. Of course.
Maybe I was being naive. Willow Tit is a really tough county description bird in Suffolk and Norfolk, where as Marsh Tit is a relatively common breeder, therefore it was a much overdue tarts tick. I did know that the all-dark bill was the only diagnostic thing left. But I was expecting a subtly different beast, with its bull neck, contrasting bright white cheeks and with enough wing panel to make an icky proud. So when one finally popped out of the trees, flits to the feeder table, picks up a seed and flits off again, I was grossly underwhelmed. It looked just like a Marsh Tit. That cheek wasn’t exactly pure white and that wing panel not too bright. After 20 minutes viewing it was obvious there were 2 Poecile tits visiting. One, pretty much a classic Willow Tit, all dark bill, pale cheek and wing panel, the other one was a lot messier. Unfortunately I never managed a shot of the ‘classic’ individual, but did get a few photos of the messy Parus.


Looks a lot like a Marsh Tit.

Yes I give up pretending to know anything on ID.

Also present at the feeders was a Jay and a few rats.


Why the Jay turned out so well, I can’t work out. Dank light, high ISO, no shutter speed…

Heading north, we overnighted with relatives in Guisborough before carrying on to Edinburgh via train. The east coast mainline heads right up the Northumberland/Borders coast, so as well as the spectacular scenery, there were plenty of ‘gulls’ over the sea. But it was only when one of these gulls swept its wings back, hung over the cobalt sea and plunge dived, did I realise my mistake. In mitigation, never ever did I expect to see a Gannet from a train.
Scenes from my phone, through a train window that's never been cleaned...




The Sunday was the long trip south, taken with a leisurely detour. To Suffolk, via Spurn point, the saving grace of Humberside. The lack of easterlies had dulled expectations and in the short hour and a half we were able to give, 1 Lesser Whitethroat was the highlight. Considering the weekend before it had held 5 lifers…

Salvaging a tenuous victory from an otherwise obvious failure, it was nice to have finally visited every Icterine Warbler’s favourite spring holiday destination. Let me put it this way, if it was in East Anglia, I would give up everything to live there. As a site, it’s that good. I only managed to visit the very end tip of the point, but the head height sea buckthorn, with tight winding paths that suddenly seem to disappear into a pillbox or other military relic. This place is an adventure playground for birders with absolutely no health and safety and a burger van. I absolutely loved it. No landscapes because I was to busy looking at nothing, no description, I’ll do that in the future when I return…

Hello...

...have you missed me? I certainly haven't given up birding as Connor asked, I'm just stuck in a quagmire of not having enough time to write due to school work and when I do have the time I get writers block.
Currently it is now half term and I should be birding every day. Unfortunately H1N1 has other ideas, making writing tough and birding pretty much impossible. Clearly for the obvious reasons that I don't want to consign hugh swathes of the british twitching population to their sick beds and make them miss the chance to year tick Pallas's Warbler. That would be bad.

Posts in waiting consist of:
Spurn: a quick trip on my way back from the university of Edinburgh's open day.
South West: Woodchat Shrike, Basking Shark, Fudge Duck, Long-billed Dowitcher and Red Kites, to and from the university of Exeter's Falmouth campus...
Minsmere: Red-flanked Bluetail followed by Velvet Scoter! Unblocked! At last!

Coming some time soon. Just don't bet on it.