My 154th species for the year and one that I’ve not seen since the long-stayer at Titchwell in 2004. In this country that is: Barcelona and Malta have supplied sightings in the interim. Travels farther afield have also brought black-necked (USA) and white-headed (Australia).
But the Somerset Levels bird was the European black-winged stilt and it hung around late Sunday evening, thank God. A crash at Wincanton on the A303 delayed me 90 minutes. It happened a mere mile in front of me and caused much speculation on how I could have shaved off my time there to miss it, or even taken a different route at the previous junction, which I could well have done. On the flip side of course are accidents I have avoided over the years, which almost by definition I also wouldn’t know about.
The sighting of this elegant long-legged wader was even more fortuitous because it’s not been reported since. I must have been the last to see it.
I was returning from a week in Crawley, which must rank with Bedford on the urban horror scale. Its one bright spot is an excellent curry house, the Taj Mahal, right by the station. On the birding front only Weir Wood Reservoir is nearby and my one visit there didn’t yield much.
However, the Sunday trip back gave me one hobby at Pulborough Brooks and the year’s first yellowhammer at Cheesefoot Head, near Winchester. I was hoping for a repeat of quail there but it may still be a touch early for that.
The total for the day put me seven behind last year but 2013 dried up over the summer so I only need to go rarity chasing to pull ahead. By contrast one of my record years (2010) stood at 176 by this time and kept going until a stutter in August.
I have a few strange blockers for 2014 – snipe, redpoll and greenshank, for example. Dipper is also missing and is the one bird I could find in Bristol. Except I never have since 1990 or thereabouts when I wasn’t even a twitcher! Several attempts up the River Frome lately haven’t yielded a single record. I begin to believe someone’s making the bird up.
Gales a couple of weeks back drove kittiwakes and fulmars up to Severn Beach, and probable arctic terns but I’m not calling them. I missed the skuas and petrels of course. I can’t complain about missing birds at Brook Common in the New Forest the following weekend because a couple of woodcocks fell my way. The first was puzzling and I dismissed it as a sparrowhawk – that sort of size and brown upperparts in poor light, why not? The second though flew off the forest floor. Even so its identity took about half an hour to sink in.
Another whoopee moment has befallen me on the way home from work this evening. I take the narrow lanes west of Nailsea to get to Waitrose and the narrowest of them had what I first took to be a dead creature at its edge. I slowed and a good thing too. The bundle turned and lifted off. It was a little owl.
Only seen once last year, it’s become species number 155 this year. So I haven’t had to chase rarities yet.