An American Song Sparrow at Thornwick bay in Yorkshire

      

Well that’s metrological spring done and dusted then! It was a funny one with lots of sun, hardly any rain and a predominance of northly wind. It seemed quite slow for mega rarities and, as per previous blogs, most of my birding time was spent locally.

 

June, however, got off with an avian bang with rare birds seemly being found almost every day. Unfortunately though, they were largely either difficult or impossible to twitch. In the impossible category sits arguably the bird of the year so far, an absolutely stonking male Pallas’s Reed Bunting on Fair Isle off the coast of mainland Shetland. Weather conditions made it impossible for any birders to get there on the day it was found and there was no sign of it the following day. In the hard to twitch category sits a beautiful Blue-cheeked Bee-eater seen off and on for a couple of days on Iona, an island off the coast of Mull itself a ferry ride from Oban.

 

As I was thinking about heading off to bed on Sunday a report appeared on our excellent “twitching the UK and Ireland” WhatsApp group of a mega rare American Song Sparrow at Thornwick Bay near Flamborough in Yorkshire. Someone had taken a picture of the bird at 10:30 that morning and subsequently posted it to a social media page asking what it was. By the time this post was found and the bird identified it was pushing on for 10 pm. With just 10 records to date, could this be the mega addition to my UK bird list I’ve been waiting for all spring?

 

With suitable breaks Flamborough is some 4 hour drive from home so I decided to wait to see if it was reported first thing on Monday by locals. Sadly ,it was nowhere to be seen and, if this ran true to form, that would be that.

 

So I was quite surprised to see that it was seen again and showing well at the same spot early on Tuesday morning. By 09:00 I was christening my new Volvo on its first proper twitch. The Volvo, rather oddly called a mild hybrid, is so much more fuel efficient than my old gas guzzling  3 litre Disco running at nearly half the fuel cost.

 

I arrived at Thornwick bay just  before 1 pm on a very pleasant warm and sunny afternoon and made my way to the gully where a large group of  birders were assembled. The Sparrow had been showing off and on all morning and was being comparatively faithful to a group of nettles where it was giving obscured views while it fed. I had a couple of glimpses before another birder kindly let me have a look through his scope at the bird. There was UK tick number 425 and the third rare American Sparrow I have seen after White Throated and White Crowned.

 

As mentioned above, with just 10 previous UK records this hit the spot as a true three star mega belying that fact that this is the most widespread and abundant sparrow in North America. It is resident in the central states of the USA but northern and Canadian birds migrate south for the winter. Adult song sparrows have brown upperparts with dark streaks on the back and are white underneath with dark streaking and a dark brown spot in the middle of the breast. They have a brown cap and a long brown rounded tail. Their face is grey with a brown streak through each eye.  It is, of course, named after its distinctive song which I’ve heard previously in America. As befits such an abundant and widespread bird there are some 25 recognised sub species.

 

After a couple of hours of much the same activity with the Sparrow showing obscure glimpses in the nettles I was reconciling myself to the fact that this would be as good as it gets when It flew out of the nettles and perched somewhat distantly out in the open for a few moments. I was using my Cannon 100-500mm zoom without adaptor, the rational being it would be easier to find the Sparrow in the vegetation with it rather than big bertha.

 

Pleased to have finally got a reasonable view I went back to the car to grab a sandwich and a drink before swapping over to big bertha with x 2 extender giving me a 1000mm focal length and went back for seconds. This large focal length goes hand in hand with a tiny field of view making it hard to find subjects with no reference points, especially  in lots of confusingly similar vegetation. It also really challenges the auto focus so in this situation I turn it off and focus manually. The R5 has a very neat feature when focusing manually- arrows in the viewfinder when the focus is set to manual which converge and become green when the subject is in focus.

 

After another hour or two of sulking about in the vegetation the bird again flew out and perched up in full view somewhat closer than on the first occasion and I managed to get a few slightly better photos. 

 

After this view with over 5 hours on site behind me I decided to make a move home.

On the way back I paused to photograph the very striking full strawberry moon. Dust from the fires in north America has drifted over to Europe producing some strikingly red sunrises and sunsets and the strawberry moon glowed with a lovely red- orange hue. This happens because the small dust particles selectively scatter the blue light but allow the red light to shine through.

     

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!