My marketing director in a previous existence once said to me while we were discussing a high risk, high reward business opportunity – “Well you are a long time dead Jim!”. His meaning being that you only get one shot at some things in life. This quote has stuck with me and, perhaps, grown in relevance as I have become older. Recently attending the funeral of an elderly relative and celebrating her amazing life yet again brought this sentiment banging home to me.
Moving onto Friday then …..
Greater Sand Plovers, with just 17 previous records to the end of 2019, are as rare as hens teeth in the UK so when one was found late on Thursday evening on the beach at Redcar in Cleveland I was itching at the bit to go and acquire a new UK tick.
There was, however, a complication in that our Doberman recently had major surgery on an ACL injury and needs watching pretty much continuously. She is more or less on bed rest and is not allowed to jump up and stress the leg at all. She had a 14:15 appointment at the vets on Friday to have her stiches out and I had to be on hand to carefully help lift her out of the car when Carolyn got home – she weights 40 Kgs!
A quick mental calculation said that if I left home at 15:00 I would have a very traffic dependent 60 minutes before the sun set to see the bird. The Sand Plover, however, had other ideas and flew off into the distance early afternoon – bu*ger! All was not lost however as it was re-found a mile or so up the beach in a somewhat less accessible spot at 16:00.
I rechecked with Carolyn if it was OK to go and took her “well its better than you grumping around the house all day” to mean yes and rapidly departed for Redcar. Now Friday afternoon is the worst possible time to try and get from my house to the other side of Birmingham and the car park formally known as the M42 was true to form. After a rather stressful 4 hour drive I arrived in Redcar just as the sun was setting and used OS locate on my phone to get to the reported location some 1 mile along the beach from Redcar. Now I should have parked in Redcar and walked along the beach as instructed on RBA as I would then have discovered that the Plover had relocated back to its original position by the bandstand. Me being me however I tried to park closer and ended up scrambling through vegetation and over a golf course onto the beach. When I got there I found that the bird had relocated and so scrambled back to the car and drove back to the bandstand. It was now essentially dark with no hope of locating the bird. I considered sleeping in the car and waiting for dawn but Redcar was alive with Friday night youngsters who had seemingly already consumed copious quantities of falling over liquid. How dare they, I never did anything like that long ago when I was young! So I checked into a local Travelodge for what turned out to be a very interrupted, I think the falling over liquid people had followed me, nights sleep.
Bleary eyed I got up at 05:00 and headed back to the bandstand where perhaps 20 birders were already looking out over the beach in the pale pre-dawn light. As is often the case, a friendly birder let me look through her scope before I had mine set up and there in all its glory was the Sand Plover. Now I could relax and enjoy watching and photographing the bird!
The Greater Sand Plover breeds in the semi-deserts of Turkey and eastwards through Central Asia. It is strongly migratory, wintering on sandy beaches in East Africa, South Asia and Australasia. It is only a very rare vagrant to western Europe and the UK. Compared to the many common Ring Plovers present it appeared very chunky and thick billed. Its most obvious distinguishing feature though was a broad chestnut coloured band on the upperparts of its breast. It is very similar to its cousin, the Lesser Sand Plover, an even rarer vagrant to the UK, being mainly differentiated by its size.
Looking out over the large flock of Sanderling and Ringed Plovers feeding amongst the seaweed I found myself admiring the patch workers who relentlessly go through the birds on their local patch every day looking for something special. Hats off to you and well done!
The Sand Plover was very much holding its own on the beach, often chasing Ring Plovers and Starlings away. It certainly seemed to be finding plenty of things to eat amongst the seaweed and I spent a very enjoyable two hours watching and photographing our rare visitor. It was always a little distant and I had some trouble focusing the R5 on the bird, it tended to focus on the seaweed behind it even when it was on single spot focus. Good job I took a silly number of photos then! When I got home I looked on a R5 chat forum and discovered that I should have turned the autofocus to single shot and not servo as I had it set. Oh well I’ll know next time!
A four hour drive home, interrupted only by a celebratory full English breakfast, had me home in time to follow the Saturday football and, all be it much too briefly, see Brighton top of the premier league. – eat your heart out Nick – 😂😂😂!!
Could the day be any better – I think not!!!
Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!
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