One thing you can guarantee with twitching is the unexpected will always happen! . This was never so much the case as on this Sunday when a family day was planned. We were looking after our two eldest grandchildren with their parents picking them up in the evening and joining us for a meal. But the gods of birding had other ideas for me as at 09:14 an alert of a Leach’s Petrel inland at Mission hit the bird alert services. This is a bird that I have some history with having missed a bird at Cheddar last year by 10 minutes. I reconciled myself that this was going to be one that got away and carried on with jobs around the smallholding. I came back inside around 11:00 when my long suffering wife greeted me with those wonderful words, “do you want to go and see your bird?”. Almost before she had drawn her next breath I was in the car and off on the two hour twenty minute drive to Mission.
This was a twitch with considerable jeopardy as this is a strictly pelagic bird outside its breeding season and could fly back to the ocean at any time. With Apple Play running in the car I was able to listen to updates on our brilliant “twitching the UK” WhatsApp group which encouragingly reported that the bird was “showing well”.
I guess I was about 200m from my destination when I hit a pothole with a loud crunch and it was immediately obvious that I had a puncture. I limped to a safe parking spot and examined my damaged tyre. It was very obvious that no amount of sealant that Volvo put in the boot of their cars in lieu of a spare tyre was going to seal this as the tyre was shredded and in two parts! Volvo assist have a service where you press a button in the car and then quickly get to talk to an assistant. After describing my predicament, Volvo booked one of their technicians to come out to me with the plan of fitting a space saver to get me home. Text updates on my phone gave me the technicians location and told me he was an hour away. Plenty of time to see the bird and get back to my car then!
I walked out along the causeway towards where I could see other birders gathered in the distance. Returning birders confirmed that the Petrel was still showing well very close in. It was the most unspring like day you can imagine with a strong bitterly cold wind chopping up the water. When I got to the birders I immediately spotted the Petrel bouncing about on the choppy water very close to the shore and hence my UK tick number 434 was delivered.
Now why, you might rightly ask, have I called this rather nondescript looking little brown bird incredible in my blog title? Well somehow this little bird, which is not much bigger that a sparrow, spends its entire life except for when breeding far out at sea,. How such a small bird survives such a harsh environment truly amazes me.
The fact that it is strictly pelagic outside the breeding season, and when it does come to land nests on remote islands, makes the Leach's Petrel a difficult bird to see from land. The best chance of seeing them in the UK is usually in the autumn in the northwest when strong winds can blow them close to shore. Only very occasionally are they found resting on inland water.
This small brown bird belongs, in common with many bird species that spend almost their entire life at sea, to the tubenose order. They drink seawater, so they have to excrete excess salt which they do from an enlarged nasal gland at the base of the bill.
It is strictly nocturnal at its breeding sites to avoid predation by gulls and skuas and even avoids coming to land on clear, moonlit nights. It nests in a burrow where only one egg is laid. They are far from suited to life on land and shuffle rather ungainly into their burrow.
Another factoid that I found fascinating is that birds breeding in the Artic circle have to delay breeding until autumn to avoid the 24 hour daylight of high summer.
Just one more thing that makes this bird truly incredible, their lifespan is unusually long for a bird of this size averaging 13 years although a rather staggering 38 years has been recorded. It has recently been discovered that the bird's telomeres lengthen with age, the only known example to date of such a phenomenon.
After 40 minutes I left my incredible little bird to get back to my car for the arrival of the technician. I would like to have stayed longer to get some flight shots but, in the circumstances, I was grateful to have seen the bird at all. Rather surprisingly, this is my fourth new Uk tick of 2026. The first three months of the year normally yield little or none and I’m already 50% of the way to the 8 I manged to add last year.
Back at the car the technician arrived in his van. He had the space saver with him but Volvo now decided that it couldn’t be driven on the motorway or the distance home with it fitted. Really bizarrely, their proposal was to send out a pick-up truck and have it towed to the nearest dealer. Here I would be met with a hire car to get me home. The dealer would then put a new tyre on when they opened on Monday and arrange for the car to be delivered to me and the hire car picked up!! Not only was this incredibly inconvenient for me but I recon the total cost to Volvo was in excess of £500. I suggested that surely a mobile fitter would come out and fit a new tyre and 30 minutes later that’s exactly what was happening! As I say, a truly bizarre proposal!
I was somewhat concerned with the Petrels health as it didn’t look particularly well or comfortable to me but I guess my fears were ill-founded as it flew off high towards the sea late afternoon. I hope it fairs well and doesn’t see land again until the autumn.
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