One Hell of a good week birding!
In the last week I have had 3 life ticks, 4 rarities, and sorted out one of the 6 remaining Oh-so-embarrassing problems on my Year List.
Last Sunday we headed up to the North Yorkshire coast. The first port of call was a huge caravan park half way between Scarborough and Filey, where a female Pied Wheatear had been showing well on and off among the caravans. When I first arrived it was actually hanging about near the beach, several hundred yards away and several hundred feet below...and viewed from a place where Teh Mother had no chance of getting to. I got distant but clear views, and then went to eat my breakfast. While I was doing so, I noticed the phonomenon Many Birders Wandering Around Looking Unhappy, which suggested the bird had decided to move somewhere else. later in my lunch I noticed the phenomenon Many Birders All Running Very Fast In The Same Direction, and even better they were running towards an area viewable from the car. Choking on half a sndwich, I raced to the area in question, and Teh Mother was able to get the bird too.
Next we drove ro the Yorkshire Dales, where a Two-barred Crossbill was coming to a feeder at what had been a farm in the middle of nowhere a larch plantation, but was now owned by a nice middle aged couple who had made the bird public and agreed to let the twitch into their garden. Unfortuntely the twitchers' news site had erred on the side of not annoying them, and instructed us to march to their house by public footpath, 2 miles over rough, muddy terrain, rather than up the farm track. After managing this, I arrived in the garden to see the sight most disliked by twitchers, namely everyone packing up their scopes and leaving. Meaning that the bird has just shown up and is now gone. Oh great (not).
No sooner have I settled down to waitfor it to reappear, than a thought occurs to me. This thought is not a good one. This thought concerns the fact that I have the lights on in my car. This thought causes me to get a nice asthma attack running down the farm track and along the road, three miles (but over better terrain). To find that Teh Mother noticed the lights and had turned them off within 30 seconds of my leaving. I may have said some words under my breath at that point.
However, I had seen a number of people cheekily driving up the track and parking right outside the farmhouse, so I now resolved to do likewise, relying on my mother's disabled badge to deflect any criticism. In fact when I decanted first the wheelchair into the garden, and then my mother, clinging desperately to me over the rough ground, the owner came out and asked if she'd like to come inside, and was perfectly fine with my parking there.
By this time we discovered the bird had shown 5 minutes previously (again), and that as it was now A) dusk and B) raining everyone assumed the bird would not reappear. However, we waited for 20 minutes, and suddenly, there on the feeder was the most gorgeous male Two-barred crossbill in the fading light, only 20 feet away, viewed through a telescope. Wow! doesn't begin to cover it.
Fast forward to Thursday. Since the Agency did not find me any teaching work, and since the Mother had to stay home to wait for the District Nurse to take a blood sample, I headed off alone to the Lincolnshire coast.
Once more I fell foul of the twitchers' info service not wanting to annoy landowners, as I followed their instructions, parked over a mile away from the reported site of a Steppe (Southern) Grey Shrike, followed a public footpath ankle deep in mud clay for a mile, only to find that most birders had driven down the farm track leading to the fields it was in, and that the farmer was happily chatting with them every tine he passed in his tractor; he had no problem with twitchers driving on his land, as long as they moved their cars whenever he wanted to get through.
After about 45 minutes the shrike appeaed in the hedge about 400 yards away. Not the best view, considering it had been shooed off twitchers shoes, bonnets and wing-mirrors at times, but OK it's a tick...
Everyone else, of course immediately bombed off to the Desert Wheatear 15 miles away. I, unfortunately, had to walk back the mileover the muddy footpath to my car, and so once again arrived t the wheatear site as light was failing. BUT there aw a a positive to this (for once) as the footpath was long the top af a clay sea wall, and I was able to see a merlin hunting over the salt marsh. As this was one of my 6 ultra-embarrassing Haven't-Had-This-Year birds, I wasn't too unhappy.
So to the Desert Wheatear site. A certain sense of deja-vu from Sunday. All the twitchers have left, saying it's too late for the bird to show. Again the pouring rain, and the wind. And there in the fading light, on a huge expanse ( a over a mile, such as they have in Lincolnshire) of sand on the beach, a tiny, fragine female desert wheatear. Oh, sweetie, yes it's a lot of sand, but it isn't a desert in Africa like you were looking for. Oh, sweetie, you are SOOOO lost.
And so home in triumph, to the sound of a lot of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden