Sunday 9 September 2012

RBS find (not the bank!)

Today I decided to go to Winterton, ideally to try and re-find the scarce blue tailed damselflies but failing that I had not seen Southern Emerald in Norfolk so thought what the heck its a win win situation as the SE's have been there all week.
As happens so many times when birding winterton....it seems dead! Even on a good day Winterton has so much habitat it is hard to work and hard to keep focus especially when there is sod all about. so today I walked about 800m before seeing my first grounded bird, it was however a Whinchat so I thought it at least showed promise. 6 Mipits flew South, reminding me that vis mig should be better than it had been up to this point too, but the sun was out and it was very pleasant. After another 8 or so different whinchats I thought there could be something else on the cards for today. At this point I saw a pale bird on top of a bush, bins up,  juv Shrike, nice one! The number of times I have wanted to see a shrike on top of one of the many decent 'shrike bushes' and now I had one, a juv. I had to look through the scope as it was pretty distant and fired off a couple of shots just to make sure I had something on record, pretty sure it was red backed though, then I noticed a dog walker heading straight for the bird...great. I tried to move closer to get a better view before it was flushed, put my camera up took the shot below and then it was gone. I could not relocate it dispite looking quite hard, each scan turning up more Whinchats on top of bushes but no shrike.I should imagine I had well over 20 Whinchats this morning in the dunes up to the concrete blocks, I'd only seen one before today this year. I phoned it into RBA and just made sure I had the id as Red Backed Shrike correct. Great start to the first bit of birding of the week. I didn't see the ode's I went for but got a good find to compensate nicely.