Monday, January 28, 2013

You dare....

A county tick...

I'm just waiting for the first blogger who titles their Cattle Egret post 'Egret's I've had a few' and that's my monitor booted...

Anyway, yesterday on Holy Island, a fantastic county bird was identified after a three day guise as a Little Egret, an understandable oversight considering this is only the second for Northumberland and the first since 1986. That bird was on private land and seen only by Roger Forster, 'Hexham' Ray Craig and John Proudlock.

As you can imagine all the local county listers, including yours truly, were keen to get onto Lindisfarne to add this fallen blocker to ever slowing lists. Unfortunately for those tardy enough to have a cup of tea and half a bar of dairy milk at the car before going on site, by nine oclock it had taken cover in the only sheltered garden on the Crooked Lonnen.

The garden of the white chalet is the only inaccessible tree filled spot on the island, but it is quite small so we just had to wait it out and scan through the straggled hawthorns and sheep mesh until our goal wandered into view on the lawn.

I managed a couple of just about reasonable views as it pulled unseen morsels from the grass and that was it. It filtered out of sight, a bit like our enthusiasm, so we wandered off towards the harbour.

On the rocket fields were 380+ Teal, scanned for yankee versions, and 60+ Pale bellied Brents.

Thats probably the listing excitement for this year so its back onto the patch, where I still cant find a Yellowhammer. I know where they are though...

...while us filthy county listers were shamefully abandoning ship, a well known Stringer  Pied Piper has lured them to his lair....


7 comments:

Ragged Robin said...

Well done on the Cattle Egret Stewart - great "tick" :)

Anonymous said...

Glad you caught up with it Stewart.

Alan Tilmouth said...

Superb bit of colouring-in as usual but I can't help but note that your proportions are all wrong on this one. My views were more akin to the white dot just visible above right of the eye on your sketch.

Stewart said...

Alan, you should have stayed for the superb views in excellent light that we had later on. A bit like my notes, that is the view I had before it walked out of sight...

Dean and Caroline - Cheers...

Emma Anderson said...

Hi Stewart: You should publish your beautiful notebooks. What a wonderful record of your birding over the years.

Michelle said...

... but than again, too few to mention. ;)

Coming from Africa I was completely NOT expecting to see egrets here in the UK. It has been quite a revelation to realise how little I knew about bird migration.

I've always loved egrets, they manage to be so WHITE, like the best ever washing detergent advert. :D


Stewart said...

Thanks for that Michelle. Not many Egrets in Scotland then again I did see Snowy Egret near Oban, a first for the UK from the USA!