I was woken on Wednesday 9th March by John and Fuzz who had been paged news of a probable Black-faced Bunting, a potential first for Britain, which had turned up near Manchester. No way! The following hour was hectic trying to arrange a lift for tomorrow, as I already had a day off from lectures. We secured the offer of a lift to Manchester with a non-birding mate who was going to York, but he couldn't bring us back to Norwich. This was no good. Fortunately, John and Fuzz came good and managed to get us a lift with a lad called Tim. This seemed a much better option so we gratefully accepted their offer. After a nervous night during which we were too excited about the chance of seeing a first for Britain to sleep, we headed over to John and Fuzz's accomodation block at 3.45am. We left at 4am.
By 9am we had arrived at Pennington and were a little surprised to see loads of birders cars already there, but then it was a potential first for Britain. I guess we were lucky we hadn't come on Saturday, when it would be a lot busier! We saw some of the older UEA students already leaving - what time had they left Norwich?! They told us the bird was showing on and off, which filled us with relief. Anyway, after a short walk, we arrived at a bird feeding area in a patch of bushes, where the bunting had been hanging out for the last few days. Due to the large crowd of birders present when we arrrived, I didn't have much chance of seeing the bird even though it was in view. However, a small number of birders left after this sighting, so I managed to squeeze to the front of the crowd. Shortly, the drab Dunnock-like bunting hopped into view on the ground. This bird, which I had barely heard of, was now on my list, though whether it would be accepted as a wild bird remains to be seen (it was!). The bunting shuffled about feeding on grain, along with lots of finches and Reed Buntings. It was quite non-descript, with Dunnock being the closest in terms of colour. I think it was fair enough that the finders were unsure of the identification at first as most of us present had never even heard of this species.
(pic from BBRC tweet, no photo credit)
It turned out to be a really sociable twitch with best mate Dunc Poyser there who had come over form Edgehill College. There were also other people I knew from Yorkshire and who I'd met a few years previously on Fair Isle, so once I'd enjoyed my views of the bird, I backed off and enjoyed catching up with all these birders. We headed home all very pleased which helped get us through a nightmare journey which took over six hours!
No comments:
Post a Comment