It was my 68th birthday on Friday and boy did we celebrate in style! Dinner at our favourite Italian restaurant with good friends was washed down with copious amounts of Italian Red wine followed by a few Limoncello shots. We then retired to our friends house and energetically tucked into their delicious home-made toffee vodka. By all accounts a thoroughly good time was had by all but boy did I suffer on Saturday! I remember a time in the dim distant past when I didn’t get hangovers. When I was still living at home pre-university I would often go out for a few beers with my dad to his working men’s club. I remember him complaining of how hungover he was the next day but I seriously thought he was making it up as I had no experience whatsoever of this terrible curse of the drinking classes! Sadly those days seem long gone!
So with Saturday a complete write-off I resolved to get off my backside on Sunday and twitch a rare Pallid Swift which has been in a small village on the coast of Norfolk for the past week. Having never seen one in the UK, this would be another British tick for me.
If I’m going to Norfolk, particularly at this time of year, I like to arrive by 10:00 to make the eight hour round trip worthwhile. Arriving on site at my planned 10:00 I found a few other birders wandering around the village green by the church. I enquired about the Pallid Swift but everyone there was looking for a flock of Waxwings, seemingly unaware of the rare swifts presence. It took about 15 minutes for the penny to drop that I was in entirely the wrong place! The Swift was at a small village called Winterton-by-the sea but I was at Wiverton some 40 miles up the coast. I had started typing the destination into my satnav which picked up on Wiverton as I had been there several times before. When I checked the route all seemed well as I was headed to the Norfolk coast, perhaps my brain was still fuddled by my birthday excesses. Now 40 miles might not seem far but on the small windy Norfolk roads it’s a good hours drive. So it wasn’t until 11:45 that I finally arrived at the correct destination – so much for getting up early to be there by 10:00!
Fortuitously, the unmistakable profile of the swift was immediately obvious hawking for insects over the church. It subsequently seemed to hawk all over the village and would disappear for maybe 10 or fifteen minutes before reappearing around the church or playing field. If truth be told, if it was May I would have immediately dismissed it as a Common Swift.
The Pallid Swift is the mediterranean cousin of our Common Swift and, as the differences are rather subtle, is easily confused with it. It is slightly larger and a tad browner than our Common Swift. Seen well a prominent white throat patch is fairly diagnostic. Like our Common Swift it heads south to Africa for the winter. It is a rare bird in Northern Europe but it is possibly under-recorded due to its similarity to the Common Swift. Breeding further south than its common cousin it arrives earlier and leaves later. Our Swifts normally depart at the end of July so any Swift seen this time of year is quite likely to be one of the rarer species. Swifts are true masters of flight, usually only landing to breed, they even sleep and copulate on the wing.
The Norfolk bird was reported to be a Juvenile and had been present for at least a week. In an exception to the above, it appeared to be roosting overnight in the tower of the village church. So what was it doing in Norfolk some 1,700 kilometres north of its breeding range? There are two likely explanations. Firstly, it could have simply been blown off course by storms. Secondly, it may be genetically mis-wired with a phenomena called reverse migration, see here. Whatever the reason it seems to be finding plenty of insects to sustain it, presumably due to our mild wet autumn. One has to fear for it, however, as the cold winter weather approaches unless it decides to head south, but, in all honesty, it’s a bit late now for it to do that.
Over the course of the next 4 or so hours the Swift came and went on its busy way as I watched it and tried to get some half decent photos. Trying to photograph it reminded me of why I gave up trying to photograph our Common Swifts years ago! If you had to describe the worst conditions for photographing a fast flying Swift having the bird high up hawking for insects against a laden grey sky would probably be top of the list. A dull coloured bird against a grey sky meant that with 2 stops of overexposure and a high shutter speed I was shooting at an uncomfortably high ISO speed to get a result that would need heavy cropping. Photographing Swifts against a grey sky never really works, you need blue sky as a background and strong clear illumination without shadows. The point was strongly brought home to me by another birder who showed me a perfectly exposed and detailed picture his mate had taken the previous sunny day against a blue sky. Oh well -it was a good birthday!
Footnote - My blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!
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