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.

Bulgaria Day 8

The last day of the holiday threatened to be a total rainoff.

We set off along another upland track similar to the one on Day 3 but it only lasted for half an hour or so. We had seen a sombre tit and a lesser spotted woodpecker and I got a photo of a brown argus before the heavens opened.

A strange butterfly

It looked like it would be in for the day and so we headed for the nearest town to do a little sightseeing instead.  We did see one butterfly there, though not of the kind we had been looking out for.  One of the group needed some dental treatment so we had lunch in town too, which all took a while.

Out of nowhere it then brightened up and so we headed off again, scouring some roadside meadows.  The butterfly sightings started to come slowly but surely and when we entered a small meadow near a river, there was half an hour when they were turning up in almost the same quantities we had experienced during the middle of the week.

We moved on to another couple of meadows towards the end of the day, but things were already quietening down somewhat.

Most were things we had already seen but there were some additions, notably idas blue, sloe hairstreak and eastern baton blue.  I think though the joy at seeing a good number of butterflies on the wing again that was more important than hunting down new species.