More unreliable memories but I'd now got a camera so some photos too.
1975 started with a day trip to
Portland and visits to the usual Glamorgan sites. I went home for a weekend in early February and
saw 3 Rough-legged Buzzards at Windover Hill but failed to find the Isabelline
Shrike at Pagham. I was finally successful
in seeing a Ring-billed Gull at Blackpill (on my third attempt). Having Rob Hume and Keith Vinicombe there to
point it out certainly helped! I had
better luck with the Isabelline Shrike too on my next trip home, getting good views by the Long Pool
at Pagham in March.
Maurice Chown took Hadyn Jones, Dave Pitman and me up to the Solway, Cairngorms and Loch Fleet at Easter. Geese on the Solway were excellent, but a Black Grouse lek at Holm of Dalquharn was even better – as we approached the site we saw a lone male lekking to itself, presumably not an alpha male. The lek proper was about a mile further on where eleven males were performing although by the time we arrived they were starting to break up. We still witnessed some rather comical action between the remaining birds, warily facing each other with tails fanned like rather timid boxers. We continued via Murray’s Monument (where we saw Golden Eagle) to the Cairgorms and saw a male Capercallie in Rothiemurchus, a welcome change in fortune after drawing a blank the previous summer. If the Solway and Cairngorms had been good then Loch Fleet was absolutely brilliant. We encountered a flock of 1500 Long-tailed Duck, an unbelievable sight as the most I’d seen together before was just 2! A flock of 1000+ Eider was also impressive especially as it contained 3 male King Eiders. We had really excellent views of one of them and it was stunning. There was also a large raft of scoter present, further out and requiring careful scrutiny through a telescope but amongst 1000+ Commons and 200+ Velvets I eventually managed to pick out both the male Surfs that were present, although views left room for improvement. As well as the sea-duck we saw 4 Glaucous Gulls - all in all it was amazing winter birding.
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| The Grampians from the A9 |
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| Cairngorm campsite |
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| Dave, Maurice & Hadyn setting up camp near Loch Fleet. Fortunately the snow was restricted to the highlands |
On 6 April 1975 I was invited on a
twitch to the village of Haresfield in Gloucestershire to see a Slate-coloured
Junco, my first American passerine in Britain.
A nice bird even if the location hinted at ship assistance. Back home for a weekend I saw a wintering Yellow-browed
Warbler at West Dean in Friston Forest, my first unusual phylloscopus
warbler. Two weeks later we went down to
Portland to look for a male Subalpine Warbler.
It was being seen between the Observatory garden and the Coastguards, but
I was always one step behind it. After
chasing backwards and forwards for a couple of hours I decided to wait outside
the Coastguards and eventually (about four hours after starting my
search) I finally saw it there. It gave
excellent views and was on view for about 45 minutes, a stunning bird. I saw it again later that day and we also saw a Red-spotted Bluethroat in Dorset on the way back to Cardiff. We had planned to go to Portland the following weekend too and saw the Subalpine Warbler again but the views didn't match my first. Yes had been playing in Cardiff that weekend, something I was disappointed to have missed as they were one of my favourite bands, but I caught up with them during the week at the Colston Hall in Bristol. It was a brilliant set that more than made up for having to spend most of the night on Bristol Temple Meads Station waiting for the first train back. I
returned home for a weekend in May seeing a male Cirl Bunting at Beachy.
The next weekend I set off on a two
week VW minibus trip to the Camargue & Pyrenees with Geoff Bond, Richard
Bosanquet, Pete Campbell, Ken Dummigan, Chris Murphy, Pete Naylor and Nigel
Redman. Richard, Pete N and Nigel (who did
most of organisation and driving, and we did drive some long distances) had
been on the Majorca trip the previous autumn.
The others were friends of Nigel’s based around Liverpool – an excellent
crowd. Highlights in the Camargue were
the colourful Bee-eaters with their liquid ‘preep’ calls which were often to be seen perched on
telephone wires over sandy banks where they might nest. On two days we saw over 50. We saw two groups of three White-winged Black
Terns, stunning in summer plumage, the last with Black and Whiskered
Terns too. North of the Camargue I had
excellent views of a singing male Ortolan Bunting which far outweighed
expectations and I was quite taken by a male Lesser Kestrel that cruised past
me at eye-level. The flamingos might
have looked a bit artificial on the lagoons but were superb in flight. Not everything was easy and seeing Collared
Pratincoles took a couple of attempts, on our first we bracketed the site by
half a mile on each side without finding them.
More precise directions the next time did the trick. We heard Scops Owls calling from around the
campsite on six evenings before a final determined effort tracked one down –
the early eater catches the Scops.
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| Camargue campsite, Scops time approaching |
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| Large Peacock Moth and my thumb |
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| Flamingos |
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| even more bizarre in flight |
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| Black-winged Stilt |
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| Night Heron |
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| Collared Pratincole, excellent views on our second attempt |
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| Les Baux |
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| La Caume |
We left the Camargue after a week and headed via Carcassone (Rock Sparrow) to Gavarnie in the Pyrenees where we camped for four nights. We saw a selection of good birds – Lammergeyer, Rock Thrush, Snow Finch - but I was particularly keen to see Wallcreeper. On our third day I ventured up one side of the D’Ossoue Valley which looked a likely spot for Wallcreepers. I laid on my back scanning the cliffs above me, more in hope than expectation. After some time, and before dozing off!, I saw a flash of red as a bird flew in and landed on the rock above me. I turned over and got by binoculars on it just in time to see another flash of red as it flew off. Very frustrating. I returned to tell the others that I’d probably seen a Wallcreeper and we all climbed back up to where I’d been. I continued higher up but saw nothing while some of the others saw two fly over from the original place. Typical. We returned the next day and in four hours of watching I had two views, the first was of a small bird with very rounded wings flapping not unlike a large butterfly which flew over us and landed on the rock face above and disappeared into a small hole. I got my telescope focussed on the hole and when it emerged I was able to get reasonable views as it crept around the rock face a bit before flying off. It was distant even through a telescope but its down-curved bill and white spots on the primaries were readily seen. Half an hour later another bird flew directly over us heading in the same general direction. Up to then Wallcreeper had been an obsession bird and although I was looking forward to getting better views it was an encounter that would linger in my memory. The length of the drive home was, unfortunately, something else that lingered in the memory but it was worth it as I had seen 191 species of which 48 were new and the two weeks cost me just £90!
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| Carcassone, a good site for Rock Sparrow |
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| Alpine Chough in the Pyrenees |
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| Ken Dummigan and Pete Naylor in the Heas Valley |
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| D'Ossoue Valley and likely looking cliffs for Wallcreeper |
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| Pete Campbell, Geoff Bond, Nigel Redman and Chris Murphy at the foot of the cliffs |
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| further up the road to Port Gavarnie |
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| Port de Gavarnie |
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| the end of the road for our transport |
Back in Cardiff I was told of a Lesser
Spotted Woodpecker’s nest in Lisvane which I visited a couple of times seeing
both parents and two young. The latter
must have been hungry, despite the adults visiting every 5 minutes or so, as
they were audible 50m away. We had a
successful trip to Eckington Bridge seeing Marsh Warbler and a Ring-necked
Parakeet. With Bee-eaters fresh in my
mind from the Camargue I first thought the parakeet was going to be one and was
quite disappointed when I realised that it wasn’t. I visited the New Forest on the train but
took a tent this time and got a much better night’s sleep there than the
previous year, one lesson learned! I got
a lift with Peter Lansdown, the most knowledgeable birder and biggest twitcher in South Wales, to
see a White-tailed Plover at Little Packington.
My first First for Britain and a very striking and elegant bird. We saw it resting on its tarsi and following
letters in British Birds a couple of years later on similar subjects I penned
my first. It was published in March 1978
(Brit. Birds 71:128). “…When resting in this way, the White-tailed
Plover’s tarsi and toes stretched in front of it to about the level of the tip
of its bill and its body was kept far enough off the ground by its fibulae for
it not to look unusual”. Ken
Dummigan, from the Camargue trip, had a note in the same issue (Sabine’s Gull
head pattern) as did the late, greatly missed Peter Grant (Head pattern of
Icterine and Melodious Warbler) while the main paper was on Paddyfield Warbler
identification by Dave Flumm and Nick Lord, two exceptional birders based in Brighton at the time. They rather put my
White-tailed Plover note in its place!
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| from Cottridge & Vinicombe (1996) Rare Birds in Britain & Ireland: A Photographic Record |
I returned to Shetland in late July
with Maurice Chown and Hadyn Jones, stopping briefly and seeing Crested Tits
and Ptarmigan in the Cairngorms on the way.
We had a day on Noss where the seabirds were as impressive as on my
previous visit although the skuas were less aggressive, perhaps because it was later
in the season and their young were older and less vulnerable or maybe I knew what to
expect?
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| brilliantly camouflaged Ptarmigan on Cairngorm |
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| Fulmar chick on Noss |
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| Noup of Noss seabird city |
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| they were unbelievably impressive but quite smelly |
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| note Puffins in the foreground |
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| hard to imagine a more comical bird |
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| we must have seen at least 10,000 Puffins on Noss |
We went up to Hermaness which had almost as many seabirds
but spread over a bigger area. It also had the added attraction of Albert Ross,
the lonely Black-browed Albatross that had taken up residence in the Gannet
colony at the Saito outcrop. Other birders were there when we arrived and
pointed it out to us – it was almost directly below us but we had to get close
to the edge to see it. It just sat there on the edge of the Gannet colony
hardly moving, looking like a large Greater Black-backed Gull with enormous
pink feet. We returned the next day hoping it might fly but again it just sat
there. The best action we had was when a nearby Gannet tried to prod it with
its beak. Albert engaged in a bit of beak wrestling which lasted the two
seconds it took to wrench the Gannet off the cliff.
|
Great Skua at Hermaness keeping an eye on me ... |
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| who was showing too much interest in their offspring and its greying hairstyle |
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| Puffins were very common at Hermaness too |
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| with easily another 10,000+ seen |
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| Gannet at Hermaness |
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| Saito outcrop and Black-browed Albatross given away by its enormous pink feet |
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| the Gannets gave Albert Ross a wide berth as he was an expert beak-wrestler. He didn't feel like flying though. |
We spent four days on Fetlar where the Snowy Owl pair had four large youngsters. They were only a few days off flying and one day we saw them being ringed although we were only allowed to watch from a distance. The largest would stand on a hummock and jump up and down flapping its wings like an early flying machine. Very comical. On one occasion the female came in with a rabbit while on another it drank from a stream like a big cat. Red-necked Phalaropes on Loch Funzie were excellent again and one walked up to within three inches of my foot and would probably have come closer if my trouser leg had not flapped and disturbed it (and they were not excessively flared).
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| Fetlar |
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| Red-throated Diver on Fetlar |
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| Whimbrel |
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| Red-necked Phalarope on Fetlar, they were brilliant |
An August Bank Holiday trip to East
Anglia produced 6 Spoonbills and a Red-necked Phalarope at Minsmere but Norfolk
was quiet. I returned the following weekend seeing Buff-breasted Sandpiper at Walberswick, Spotted Crake (the most two
dimensional bird I’d ever seen) at Cley and Red-breasted Flycatcher, an Ortolan
and 5 Lapland Butings on Blakeney Point.
Five new birds in a day, plus Ruddy Shelduck. A decent seawatch the next morning from Cley
produced 3 Sooty Shearwaters, 4 Pomarine, 50 Arctic and 10 Great Skuas. THe next weekend I passed up the offer of a lift from London
for a Greater Yellowlegs at Great Yarmouth - I was still in Cardiff and it
didn’t seem worth the train fare for a day trip (a decision I regretted for
years). A couple of trips to Portland
were quiet although a Willow Tit in the net caused some excitement for the
Radipole ringers as it was only their second ever record. We would have preferred to have seen the
Aquatic Warbler they had trapped and released before we arrived.
Graham Hearl booked a chalet on St
Agnes for the last week of September and I joined him, Richard Bosanquet, Maurice
Chown, Hadyn Jones, Pete Naylor and Nigel Redman. It
was nice to return to the Scillies as a birder. We found an Arctic Warbler by Gugh Bar which
we saw well but it soon moved on. Later
we refound what we assumed was it in the Parsonage where it was subsequently
seen by most birders on the islands. The
next day however another Arctic Warbler was found at Covean and it seems likely
this was the original bird we’d seen nearby.
Both remained for several days but I only saw the bird at Covean
once. Graham had booked the last week of
September to avoid the crowds and it suited me too being before term
started. Our week was enjoyable but other than the Arctic Warblers a
little quiet, as expected being early, but that was all soon to change when the
first of several Atlantic lows hit and David Hunt found a Yellow-bellied
Sapsucker on Tresco, a first for Britain!
On Saturday 27 September, despite
gales, we got off St Agnes and on to St Marys. We were all due to leave the
Scillies that day but the Scillonian sailing had been cancelled and no
helicopters were flying, also there was a certain sapsucker we wanted to
see. Nigel, Pete and I managed to get
across to Tresco but the others didn’t join us as it was uncertain when we'd be able to get back. It was a very
rough crossing with waves breaking right over the boat but we made it and we soon
found the sapsucker which we watched until dark. We were stuck on Tresco so adjourned to the
pub feeling quite pleased with ourselves.
This was short lived when a phone call to St Mary’s revealed that a
Black & White Warbler had been found on the Garrison that evening and the rest of our group had seen it. We had an anxious night in a barn and an even
more anxious journey back to St Marys but the warbler was on view when we
arrived. We ran up and apparently disturbed
it just as David Hunt was about to get his best ever picture, at least that was
his story. We sensibly kept a low
profile but I had to smile as the incident, suitably embellished, was mentioned
in all his subsequent slide shows. Luckily he didn't know me then, he would have done a year or two later. The
warbler was absolutely brilliant but it didn’t end there. Graham, Maurice and Richard had gone to
Tresco for the sapsucker, which they had seen, and later bumped into Roy
Alderton who had found an immature male Scarlet Tanager which they just
had time to see before getting the boat back.
We were playing catch-up again!
We had a night in a church and the next morning we returned to Tresco and
after an anxious hour and a half of searching found the tanager which I
described as a cross between a female Golden Oriole and a female
Crossbill. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
was performing again and we finished the day at the Black & White Warbler - three American land birds in a day.
We spent the night with many other stranded visitors in the Town Hall but fortunately transport was back to normal the next day. After seeing the Black & White Warbler for a final time we left the Scillies,
calling in at Langton Herring on the way back to see a summer plumaged Sociable
Plover near the Moonfleet Hotel. I’d seen 4 superb new birds in as many days but my British List was still only 265!
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| Dotterel on St Mary's Airfield |
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| Scarlet Tanager on Tresco, taken by David Hunt. From Mitchell & Young (1997) Rare Birds of Britain and Europe |
Peter Lansdown found a female American
Wigeon at Kenfig and I went down one day during the week and had excellent
views of it. A very subtle bird and a very good find that I would have overlooked.
I went with Graham Hearl to Ynys-hir to see a Spotted Sandpiper found by Steve
Madge while a minibus trip to Norfolk in early November added a superb, pink-flushed Lesser Grey Shrike and my first ever Waxwing. The later was a bird I had eagerly awaited
seeing and the only disappointment was that it didn’t stay around for longer –
it was perched bolt upright on a TV aerial behaving like a flycatcher before
suddenly disappearing. Later in the month we saw
the Red-breasted Goose at Farlington. On
the first attempt the fog came in soon after we arrived and only cleared mid-afternoon
when it started raining heavily. We saw
the bird distantly and tried again the next morning. It was still raining but it was much better,
the tide was in and at one stage it was the closest bird on the water. A few days later Graham had a call to make in
Devon, he was working as a company rep, and asked if I’d like to join him in
trying for a wintering Lesser Yellowlegs.
I did and we found the bird on the Teign Estuary without too much
difficulty. A week later I saw a flock
of 300 Bramblings near Cardiff, looking exceptionally colourful in brilliant
sunlight. I returned to Farlington with
my dad before Christmas seeing the Red-breasted Goose again and 6 roosting
Long-eared Owls, another most wanted bird for me. Although the owls appeared to be asleep their
heads had a way of following me as I walked around them. While watching them a Short-eared Owl flew
past over the marsh, 7 owls in a minute!
Two days after Christmas Andrew Moon
drove Pete Naylor, Nigel Redman and me up to the Cairngorms and Loch Fleet. I was rather anxious about the journey up
having just got over a bout of diarrhoea but kaolin and morphine did the trick. We started at Cairngorm where we saw Ptarmigan
in camouflaged winter plumage. That was
all very well when there was snow on the mountains but when we looked there
was none and they were rather easy to spot.
We saw six birds, all white with black edges to the tail and a small
black eye. One was a male with red
combs. Andrew drove on to Rothiemurchus
where we saw two Capercallie and Loch Fleet where duck numbers were lower than
they had been when I’d visited at Easter but still impressive and more time in the area gave us time
to see divers, birds of prey and a Spoonbill.
We saw single male King Eider and Surf Scoter, the former giving
excellent views but the later was rather poor.
This visit we saw 3 adult Glaucous Gulls, at Easter I’d seen 4
first-winters.
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| The same Loch Fleet campsite. No escaping from the snow here despite none in the Cairngorms, in complete contrast to my Easter visit |
[blogged April 2014]
