Sunday 15 May 2016

A Day of Potential Unrealised

Thursday 12th May fresh NE Sunny 12C

I should head off for Frampton RSPB reserve in Lincolnshire. There is a wryneck there and curlew sandpiper. I don't. Instead I steadily bird Titchwell starting with a scan of the freshwater lagoon. 

There is a gorgeous male garganey out in the middle and a lone wood sandpiper on one of the islands. Both are soon gone though.
I walk to and then along alone on the immense beach that takes me to Thornham Point. I photograph items of interest on the beach and marvel at the millions of washed up razor shells. 

Along the tideline there are also mats of bryozoa and the occasional sea urchin and piddock. It's the razor shells though that are sometimes packed in deep drifts and I enjoy crunching them as I walk along. Helping make the sand on the beach, I think, as I always do when I walk along a beach, that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on every beach and in every desert in the World. A constant reminder to me of the immensity of our incredible universe.



The tick thorny bushes alongside the leaning ruin of a World War Two lookout tower look as though they should hold a migrant. They do but not the hoped for icterine warbler or white-spotted bluethroat. A chiff chaff is the only bird apart from a couple of dunnocks and a wren.
A cuckoo comes close being chased by a couple of angry meadow pipits.
Back at Titchwell I meet Trevor Girling again, the superb Norfolk birder and news comes in that a bee-eater has been seen and heard over Cley and is heading west. I position myself on the west wall walk and scan hopefully.
A Pallid swift is seen twice over Blakeney Marsh and is heading this way. I scan over the reedbed and watch every swift carefully.
Three hours later and after having joined Trevor on the meadow trail broadwalk we have to admit that neither bird has come our way.
Trevor leaves and I walk off towards Patsy's Pool. I stop for a while under the willow bushes to watch a passing group of nine baby long-tailed tits being fed by two workaholic parents. A birder excitedly runs up to me. “Did you see it?” An osprey had just flown over and has disappeared in the mist heading east.

The year list is still 241, exactly twenty ahead of this time last year.


15.93 miles 345 feet up elevation 333 feet down elevation

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