Saturday 24th October

Lambley Viaduct

The period over the last fortnight has been pretty flat. A couple of low flying kites near the house served to emphasize that poorer weather is on the way. In the garden the only item of note was the appearance of a male woodpecker, rather than the female and juvenile that were visiting in summer.

A promising walk around Featherstone and Lambley Viaduct only produced a heron and a chaffinch or two plus some large funghi and the most impressive sight was probably the viaduct itself.

Similarly little happened on two exercise bike rides to Belsay and on the Tyne Derwent Circular.  Well they do say October can be a quiet time for birds that can readily find lots of berries to eat.

Not so however on the Northumberland coast where various rarities have turned up as documented at @NTBirdClub particularly on Holy Island and I finally managed a trip up there on Thursday despite an unpromising weather forecast.

Lapwing

After a much-needed visit to the facilities, I spotted a promising path heading North just after eleven.  Rain duly arrived so I turned back as planned and had lunch in one of the village hostelries.

Nosing around the village I happened on a couple of twitchers who told me where to find the brown shrike - further along the path I had been on before, so I duly retraced my steps into the marshland areas.

Here there were a few lapwing, the odd curlew and a single kestrel resting on a fencepost, but I also found another lone twitcher, who told me the shrike and just flown off somewhere.  So I continued on the path until just before the dunes, checking every likely spot.

On turning back some frantic waving from the twitcher showed that it had reappeared and about half a dozen of us got a view of it on the other end of a wall from an unconcerned stonechat.

A considerable distance was involved and I certainly couldn't have identified it without assistance, though it did have a fairly characteristic 'jizz'.

Stonechat

Brown Shrike

It's over a hundred miles to Holy Island and back, but considering the shrike had come from Siberia, well worth the trip for only the third occasion I have seen any sort of shrike, let alone a rare one.

There were no further sensations after this but it was nice to see some early redwings and fieldfares on the way back.  

Fieldfare

I checked out some noted hotspots around the village without success.  A particular one is the Vicar's Garden, so much so that there is a birders' box for contributions to church funds on the outside wall. 

I didn't see anything worth noting there either so did not contribute, though I did get a nice view of the Vicar's Cockerel.

Vicar's Cockerel

None of the other birders I spoke to had more to report either. On consideration it may be that some migrant birds were pushed onto the coast by several days of east wind, which have now ceased and so they have mostly departed.  Shrikes however, having established a territory will tend to stay for a while.