Green with envy (If driving 800 miles for 30 seconds viewing of a rare bird is not enough to get you committed I don't know what is!)
Surely there must be a cure for this madness! For an explanation read on dear intrepid reader read on! Mid-afternoon last Thursday a report surfaced of an exceeding rare Green Warbler being trapped and ringed at Bempton Cliffs RSPB reserve. The BBRC database reports just 6 UK sightings of this green beauty. Its rarity is compounded even further by 5 of these records being on remote offshore islands while the remaining one was an almost untwitchable one day wonder in Cornwall. Hence the possibility of a twitchable bird on the UK mainland put the UK birding fraternity into somewhat of a frenzy! The Green Warbler is the more eastern relative of the imaginatively named Greenish Warbler, itself a very scare migrant visitor to these shores. It spends the warmer months breeding in a rather restricted range in Northern Turkey, Caucasus and Northern Iran before returning to Southern India and Sri Lanka to over winter. Later on Thursday reports started to emerge of near rugby scrum condi