Drop everything and twitch for a UK first!! – a Western Reef Heron in Gwynedd on the Northwest Welsh coast

 

A few days ago I was bemoaning the lack of good rare birds this spring to my good birding mate Nick . Notwithstanding the Cornish Lesser Kestrel at the start of May, nothing has troubled my UK list or made me jump out of the window and into my car.

 

Well, of course, if you are a UK birder you will certainly know what happened mid-morning on Saturday. A Western Reef Heron, sometimes called a Western Reef Egret, was found at a place called Foryd Bay on the Welsh coast. Just to add to the excitement it was, arguably, the more attractive dark morph. 

 

This was going to be a major twitch for what was immediately a very strong candidate for UK bird of the year.

 

The Western Reef-Heron is common across coastal Africa and parts of southwest Asia and is an increasing vagrant to southern Europe. It has hence been “on the cards” as a potential UK vagrant for some time.

 

All other plans for Saturday were immediately banished.  My poor long suffering wife was OK when our plans got thrown up into the air yet again as I rushed to pack the car in a state of great excitement that only the obsessive birder will fully understand.

 

Foryd Bay is just over a 3 hour drive from home and I kept up to date with reports of the Heron via the brilliant “twitching the UK and Ireland” WhatsApp group. Using Apple Play in my car I can safely listen to messages without having to touch my phone. As I arrived at Colwyn bay with perhaps 40 minutes left to drive the dreaded news came through, “flew high off to the west and lost to view”. To say the car was filled with blue language would be the understatement of the year! To cap it all it immediately started to rain cats and dogs.

 

Shortly afterwards a more encouraging message came through indicating that in had dropped into a marshy field with a Little Egret but couldn’t be seen. As I arrived another even more encouraging message came through that it had just flown a short distance with the Egret and had landed again in the same field. I had no problem finding the birds location as there were a large number of cars parked for some distance along the verge and a large crowd of birders scoping the field.

 

I set myself up and chatted to other birders, some of whom had seen the Heron make its short flight and some who had frustratingly missed it. After maybe 20 minutes a shout went up, “its in-flight” but it immediately landed again and most of us missed it. Its hard to relay the sense of frustration felt by myself and many of my fellow birders – “Did you see it ..no!”

 

I then spent perhaps another 60 minutes staring through my scope at the position where it had landed with a sense of increasing dread – surely I was not going to dip bird of the year! Occasionally a Little Egret would poke its head up from the long grass and disappear again to add to the growing sense of frustration in the crowd. Then a message went up that it was viewable from a little further along the road. With the help of a kindly fellow birder I focused my scope on where it had been and it poked its head up again. YES !!!! A combination of relief and elevation fuelled by who knows what neurotransmitters flooded my brain. Ok, it was a one out of ten view but I had seen it! Shortly afterwards one of the accompanying Egrets flew off and then the Heron took to the air with another Egret giving me my desired excellent flight views in my bins. It appeared to head back to the estuary on the falling tide and shortly afterwards it was again reported from its original coastal location.

   

 

The 1 out of 10 view - its the black blob to the left of the Egrets!

In its home territory it is predominantly found on the coast around muddy flats, sandy shores, and mangroves where it forages in shallow waters by walking slowly in search of fish, amphibians, and invertebrates. There are two distinct morphs: a dark morph, which is dark grey with a white chin and throat; and a white morph that is easily confused with the Little Egret and is best differentiated from it by bill colour and structure. During the breeding season the legs and facial skin or the dark morph are reddish and there are two long and distinctive plume feathers on the sides of the nape.

 

Hoping for better views I drove back to the bay where the Heron was “showing well” feeding amongst some seaweed. With some haze and backlighting my photos were far from brilliant and there are already much better pics on social media but after the preceding period of great frustration I was absolutely made up with the views I was treated to.

After a short while a Great White Egret took great exception to our rare visitor for some unknown reason and chased it off but it soon returned to the same location to feed. All the while more and more birders were arriving from all points of England, Scotland and Wales desperate to see this astonishing UK first. 

 

Around 18:30 I departed for home with my obsession well and truly satisfied. In modern neurodiverse parlance my wife is totally convinced that I am somewhere on the spectrum – a far from uncommon phenomena often shared by birders and Physicists in my own experience!

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