Wildlife

James Lowen

I did see the showy North Walsham Hoopoe - but that was because it was en route to picking up my daughter from a sleepover. So it didn't feel like twitching...

There was one other successful twitch this autumn - and for that I again thank Mike Buckland. I was rather surprised when news came through on the Monday morning that the reported first-winter male Scarlet Tanager near Halifax was not only real but still present. I was on the school run at the time, so an immediate departure was impossible. Back home for a coffee and to discuss options with Mike. He wanted to go immediately rather than head for dawn the following day - even though we would only have three hours' of daylight at our disposal. And he was so right. We arrived, waited forlornly for about 90 minutes, then had several good views of an unexpected bird that would prove hard to connect with over the following few days. And, being in Yorkshire, the bird was doubly special.

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15 November 2024 Autumn birding

In some ways I regret being a twitcher. In others, I really enjoy it. I get off on the adrenaline of the chase, and love seeing new birds. But my body copes increasingly poorly with long-distance driving and missing a night's sleep, and dipping is both a waste of time and money. Moreover, I came to realise on one particular weekend this autumn, I am fundamentally a birder who likes finding his own birds, over and above a twitcher who runs after other folks' finds. On the Friday, I oscillated wildly between going for the Oxon Booted Eagle at dawn on the Saturday or taking advantage of the easterlies hitting East Anglia to find something cracking in north Norfolk that day... then twitching the eagle on the Sunday if it were refound. The second option won out. The result? I found nothing better than a blythi Siberian Lesser Whitethroat, and dipped the eagle on the Sunday. Oddly, the previous weekend, I made the opposite decision. I was on my way to Norfolk's east coast to search the Broads for Penduline Tit then try and find something at Waxham when news broke that the Donna Nook Black-faced Bunting had been trapped. I made an immediate about-turn at the approaching roundabout, picked up Mike Buckland near Kings Lynn, and we were fortunate enough to refind the bird twice during the afternoon, thereby being two of very few twitchers to connect. No photos due to the bird hiding inside a hawthorn, but a nice sound-recording. A distinctive call, more a Song Thrush-like tzsip than a Little Bunting-like tik.

UK and county ticks (or county megas, e.g. Desert Warbler) aside, I try to avoid twitching nowadays: I have little free time and want to spend it trying to find my own birds. Instead, I take the arrival of a rare bird as a cue to try somewhere else for something new. For example, like everyone else, I love Pallas's Warblers, but prefer to invest time in searching for my own rather than watching someone else's - hence I didn't pop into Southwold churchyard to see one, despite being just a mile away - and instead searched Thorpeness to try and find my own. (No joy, but two Yellow-browed Warblers.) This explains why I didn't join the local crowd watching the Thornham Kentish Plover this autumn (an intriguing autumn record), and nor have I been to Cley to reacquaint myself with the returning Long-billed Dowitcher and, indeed, until Mike Buckland pretty much strong-armed me into it, why I hadn't waited until dusk to watch his returning female Pallid Harrier, despite being at the right location on several afternoons. All this means that the only rare bird I actively twitched in Norfolk this autumn was the Siberian Stonechat at Cromer - and that was largely because it was a place to meet Phil Saunders and Dave Andrews, the former up from Dorset, before we tried to find our own birds on the north-east coast. Mind you, the chat was rather lovely...

So what of actual bird finding then, this autumn? To be honest, it has been poor. Apparently good conditions have Brough very little of note to Norfolk (or to Suffolk on the one occasion I tried there. The two scarcest birds I found were actually on my first day trying - in the great fall of early September: a Red-breasted Flycatcher and a Barred Warbler. With Ash Banwell and Mike Buckland, we found another 'RBF' a few days later. Mike and I found a Common Quail - the first I've seen on migration in Britain - on a field edge: to be honest, that was probably the finding highlight of the period! That said, it's been a good autumn for bumping into Yellow-browed Warblers andblythi Siberian Lesser Whitethroats, although it's always hard to tell whether the one (or the four. in the case of YBW) you've seen have been found by someone else beforehand or not...