Big Day Out

As seems the custom nowawadays, many birders like to have a big day out from dawn till dusk to accumulate as many species as possible.  So, myself and friends who I met in Shetland decided to arrange one for this year, initially for 23rd May but then rescheduled for yesterday at last minute notice.

We decided to meet at Wolferton Triangle at 7:15am in the vague hope that we may come across a Golden Pheasant but did not linger and made straight to Snettisham Coastal Park where we clocked up Wheater, Stonechat, Ringed Plover, Grey Plover, Whitethroat and Willow Warbler along with commoner species.  We then made our way to Choseley Drying Barns, via Hunstanton (where we added Fulmar) to see if we could find any Corn Bunting, Dotterel or Turtle Dove.  Choseley had nothing so we made our way to Titchwell, which turned out to be also very quiet indeed.  However trawling round Titchwell and then Choseley again, we had a fairly healthy total of about 80 species.

We then decided to make our way to Cley via a Montague Harrier watchpoint (where we only managed to add Red Kite) and had lunch.  A walk down the east bank to the sea gave us Dunlin, Curlew and and very distant Gannet.

Our last destinations were in the Brecks (Weeting Heath and Lakenheath Fen) where we added Stone Curlew and Garganey but again both destinations were incredibly quiet on the bird front.  A final tally (after some miscounting) gave us a grand total of only 94 birds with some very obvious omissions.