On Monday I visited Trimingham near Cromer on the Norfolk coast where a small flock of European Bee-eaters are attempting to nest in a disused quarry.
The European Bee-eater is rated in the Colins bird bible as a one star rarity meaning they are an annual vagrant in some numbers. They breed in southern Europe and in parts of north Africa and western Asia, wintering in tropical Africa. They occur as a spring overshoot north of their range, with occasional breeding in northwest Europe. Climate change, though, is certainly extending the normal breeding range of the Bee-eater northwards.
The species has bred in Britain on just a handful of occasions, with the last attempt occurring in Nottinghamshire in 2017 when, unfortunately, all three nests failed. I, along with many other birders and non-birders alike, visited the Nottinghamshire site where a viewpoint at an appropriate distance was set up to watch these very charismatic birds.
European Bee-eaters are only rivalled by Rollers as the most colourful birds that you might be fortunate enough to see in the UK. They have brown and yellow upper parts, green wings, a red eye, and black bill. They are gregarious and nest colonially in sandy banks where they make their nest at the end of a long tunnel.
The RSPB had done their usual excellent job of arranging parking and a viewpoint in a field an appropriate distance from the quarry. There were maybe fifty people present when I arrived just after 10:00 composed of a fairly equal mixture of keen birders and other members of the public keen to see these vibrant and eye-catching rare visitors. There are thought to be 7 birds present, 6 adults and a first summer bird.
At the viewpoint we were a very necessary 150 meters from the nesting bank giving us good scope and bin views but making photography quite challenging. Telegraph poles adjacent to the quarry provided a convenient perch for spotting their favourite food, yes you’ve guessed in bees, swooping down to pounce on the unsuspecting insects and they returning to the wires to eat them They also had a couple of favourite bramble bushes that they would return to time and time again, sometimes singularly, sometimes with up to 4 birds perched in a line. There were very definite signs of courtship and nest building. During courtship, the male feeds large items to the female while eating the small ones himself and I observed one presumable male feeding its partner a large bee while sat on the bramble. I also saw birds scraping at the bank excavating nesting tunnels. Although they have only been present for just over a week, their excavations seemed well advanced with birds sometimes completely disappearing into their nesting holes.
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| Nesting activity |
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| Peek-a- boo!!! |
Taking pictures of birds with a long focal length lens is always challenging on sunny summer days due to the inevitable presence of heat haze which always softens the images to a lesser or greater extent. I have found, however, that if you take a sequence of shots you will quite often find that, as the heat haze varies, one image is sharper than the rest. I was using my largest 800mm lens which was somewhat of a balance between getting a large enough croppable picture while doing battle with the heat haze. At one point I decided to do a bit of an experiment and put my 2x extender on the 800 mm lens giving me an effective focal length of 1600 mm! I was expecting to have to focus manually as the autofocus would not work with this combination on my old 1DX but, to my amazement, the autofocus worked with the R5. My experience of using extenders on the 800mm is, however, not great, unlike my 500mm prime which works very well with them. Indeed the images, while pleasingly large of the distant birds were very soft, even after considerable post capture processing.
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| 800 mm |
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| 1600 mm with reduced crop for softness comparison - result 800mm with larger crop is better! |
TV had a crew present filming the twitch for the local news channel and, to my great amusement, the presenter asked if they could borrow my camera to use as a prop while filming –(almost) fame at last as my ugly mug was not required!
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| Not quite fame at last! |
I kept an eye on RBA to see if anything else of interest was around locally but there was nothing to pull me away from the gorgeous Bee-eaters so I spent some four hours watching and immensely enjoying their comings and goings.
On previous visits to Norfolk I have noticed a rather nice looking American dinner on the way home between Peterborough and Kings Lynn. Being totally fed up with service station rubbish food and having time for something more interesting as C was out for the evening with her book club, I stopped off at the dinner and celebrated my days birding with, sorry vegetarians look away now, a very nice fillet stake. I then drove home with my head full of images of wonderful Bee-eaters while having that contenting feeling that comes with having just eaten a most excellent meal!
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