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A Rollercoaster Day in Suffolk



 

One of the most exciting things about birding as a hobby is its complete and utter unpredictability together with the excitement and adrenaline rush that goes hand in hand with it. 

 

Today was a case in point.

 

My day started off pretty normally with a shower followed by a leisurely breakfast and feeding the chickens and horses. Carolyn and I then set off for a dog walk around the idyllic countryside that surrounds our new home in Pirton. When we got home I made some freshly ground coffee and cut two slices each of Carolyn’s delicious home-made malt loaf. We sat in the area at the back of the house we call our courtyard drinking our coffee and admiring our new late summer hot border which is just starting to flower.

 

By now it was 11 am and, on checking my phone, I saw that my good birding buddy Nick had messaged me as follows :-

 

“Do you need Roller”

 

This could only mean one thing – an Eurasian Roller had been found somewhere in the UK!

 

By “Do you need Roller” Nick meant do I need it for my UK list – the answer was a very big yes! I checked RBA and indeed a Roller had been found at Lackford in Suffolk!

 

I abandoned my gardening plans for the rest of the day, begged forgiveness yet again from my ever suffering wife, packed the car as fast as I could with my optics and rushed off. My shatnav ( and that’s not one of my usually misspellings!) indicated a mainly motorway journey of 2.5 hours.

 

After 30 minutes or so I pulled into some services to check RBA again only to find the dreaded “No further sign….” Now what was I to do? I exchanged messages with Nick and decided to grab a sandwich lunch from the services and wait and see if there were any more encouraging updates forthcoming. As I was finishing my sandwich Nick messaged me again to say “still there”. I checked RBA again to find that it had been spotted briefly again before flying off!

 

Oh well, in for a penny in for a pound as they use to say in pre 1974 real money, and I pressed onwards towards Suffolk. I decided not to look at RBA again until I was only 10 minutes away to check location details. When I did it said “showing well” on some wires at a slightly different location and then the adrenaline rush really set in!

 

On arrival the ever helpful birding car park attendant, otherwise known as Lee Evans, showed me to a parking spot and I half ran half stumbled to a spot where other birders were scoping the Roller on some electrical wires and there it was Bingo!

 






The Eurasian Roller is a stunningly beautiful bird, perhaps only rivalled in colour content in Europe by the Bee-eater. When perched it glows with chestnut browns and azure blues and when in flight it transforms into a blue purple blur. It is generally a bird of warmer climes, breeding in northern Africa from Morocco to Tunisia, in southern and east-central Europe, and eastwards through northwestern Iran to southwestern Siberia.  Its numbers and range are sadly slowly diminishing. It used to be comparatively common in Sweden and Germany but is now said to be extinct as a breeding bird in both countries. It winters in central and southern Africa and indeed we had many stunningly good views of a number of species of Roller in Kenya some two years ago.

 

Lilac-breasted Roller, Kenya, 2019

The Suffolk bird was an absolute stunner in the scope and I manged to get some half reasonable record shots. Their favourite food is beetles and it was regualrly swooping down from the wires to grab a tasty morsel. After 60 minutes or so it flew further away to the back of the field so I walked up the lane to where another group of birders were watching it but the sun had come out and the views were less satisfactory than the earlier ones. So I bade my farewell to this glorious kaleidoscope of colours and departed for home with an exceedingly broad smile on my face.

 

Some people say that June is a dull month for birding, but I strongly disagree, it’s an excellent month for rarities and June has already delivered a number of very scare birds including a UK first on Lundy. So far June 2021 has given me three UK life ticks in the form of today’s Roller, a River Warbler and a Red-Necked Stint – roll on the next big rare one!

 

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!  

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