Nothing typifies the ups and downs of birding as a hobby more than my last few days.
It’s been a rather odd year so far. It started with 3 new UK life ticks for me in Kentish Plover, American Buff-bellied Pipit and American Robin by mid-February. In truth I would normally have expected none at that time of year so quite a stellar start to building my UK bird list. And then …. absolutely zilch! It’s actually been a funny old stop start kind of birding spring and I’ve mostly concentrated on local birding.
Now what happens in these circumstances is that I get twitchy feet and am prone to do stupid things. This is exactly what happened last Thursday when I decided to drive down to Cornwall to see a Montagu’s Harrier. This is our rarest breeding Harrier, in fact it is almost extinct as a breeding species, and any residual breeding pairs should very definitely not be disturbed. The Cornwall bird was a lone sub adult male and its location had been widely publicised with nice photo’s online. I’ll cut the painful story very short. I parked at the stated spot at 10:00 and met another friendly returning birder who had had good views but the bird had now flown off. In fact the bird was never reported again and nine hours staring at a field atop a windy hill coupled with the eight hour drive must surely mean, of at least I very much hope so, dip of the year. To rub salt further into the wounds, stunning pictures of the Harrier taken early that morning then appeared online.
Fast forward to yesterday and I was planning a chilled out day at home with Carolyn. The horses had been done, the dogs walked and we were settling down with a nice cup of coffee prior to some chilled out gardening. I checked RBA and found that a mega rare Egyptian Vulture, presumably the bird that spent some time earlier this year in Ireland, had flown over a road in, yes you’ve guessed it, Cornwall! My every suffering wife said, “are you going then”, but burnt by last Thursdays experience, I said no, the thought of another eight hours in the car and a super dip was about as appealing as a meeting with Donald Trump!
I did some gardening for an hour or so and then checked RBA again to see that a Slate-coloured Junco had been found in a private garden in Wales and that the garden would be open for birders that afternoon. A quick calculation said I could get there by around 4 so the car was quickly loaded, Sunday dinner postponed until Monday and off I went. The journey was pretty atrocious with a number of weekend road closures and slow traffic on small roads through the centre of Wales. My arrival time on the Shatnav was going back and back and I was increasingly concerned that the garden would be closed when I got there. I eventually arrived at the designated parking spot and meet another birder who gave me rough directions and told me to hurry up as the garden was shutting soon. I walked quickly down the lane but could not locate the house so I put the map reference into RBA which dropped a pin some one mile further along the coast! Through my bins I could see some other birders in the distance at this location so I hurried along the rough beach eventually arriving where birders were scoping the shore. They were trying to find a Kenitish Plover and told me that the house was back where I had started from. Someone had clearly given RBA the wrong map reference!
I was now feeling pretty desolate in the surety that the garden would be certainly shut. By the time I eventually located the house it was pushing on toward 6. As I was walking down the lane to the house a car came down the drive, it was the owner returning to his house. I enquired about the bird, and bless him, he told me where it had been in his garden and that I was welcome to have a look! The Junco had been feasting on an area recently sown with wildflower seed. There were Robins and Greenfinches feeding on the area but no sign of the Junco. The wonderfully kind house owner joined me after half an hour or so and explained that the bird had been found by his gardener, Tom, who was coming back with his young son to try and see the bird. The owner, I think his name was Andy, then made me a cup of tea, he said it was the least he could do if I had driven that far, sometimes your faith in humanity can be resorted by a simple act of kindness. Soon Tom, his partner and young son arrived and Tom told me that he had found the bird early that morning, it had been very confiding and was taking seed off of his roller. Tom and Andy departed and I was about to give up when a blur of black and white landed in a bush in front of me, it was the Junco!
The Juncos are a group of small, greyish new world sparrows and are common across much of North America. I have seen many in the states and Canada but none of the previous 45 UK records.
This really was a trip from agony to ecstasy going from the grim certainly of another super dip to having the bird completely to myself in this very kind owners garden. For a bird that had been transported 4,000 miles off course by the jet stream it appeared to be in very rude health. It dropped down and had a bath in a puddle in front of me and then perched up again in a bush preening and shaking itself dry. It then started singing the forlorn song of a vagrant male many thousands of miles from its breeding territory, a sound which always fills me with equal amounts of pleasure and sadness.
After 20 minutes or so of this activity the bird flew off so I decided to make my way home. I knocked on Andy’s front door to say thank you but there was no answer so left my cup on his doorstep. As I started to leave I saw the bird feeding again on spilt seed by a barn and so rattled off a few more shorts before departing.
Agony to ecstasy indeed!
Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!
As a footnote I should say that the RBA map reference was correct - I'd mistyped it and then got confused by the group of birders looking for the Kentish Plover - sorry RBA!
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