I’ve not seen as many Woodlark in Norfolk this year. It’s completely unverified but I get the impression numbers are down. However, we did come across this showy individual a few weeks ago that was completely unintimidated as it walked ahead of us through a car park.
If you’re a Twite you have to find somewhere to drink as well as eat. This guttering was just the ticket for a small flock of Twite we saw on the Norfolk Speciality Birds Long Weekend.
A day or so after a full moon the tide will be high in the spring. Very high.
At Sheringham there are seemingly always a couple of wintering Purple Sandpipers. They love the granite rocks that protect the seafront. More often than not they feed and shelter among them avoiding crashing waves with amazing skill. However, when the tide is very high they leave their granite haven and venture up on to the promenade often being found among the Turnstone flocks. Out in the open they are more easily seen and photographed. We took advantage of this on our Norfolk Speciality Birds Long Weekend Tour two weeks ago.
The Dartford Warblers in North Norfolk are having a tough time. I’ve not seen one on the heath this year. Going back a few years I had a maximum of around seven. Now, it appears there’s just a single elusive male remaining. I’m not sure why there’s been such a decline as a couple of mild winters should have enabled them to survive. I guess it’s important to remember they are at the edge of their range so numbers will naturally wax and wane.
We were looking for Woodlark and I was spreading the net a little wider than I would normally do last week. Still on the coast we went up to site I don’t often visit. No Woodlark there but the quiet subsong of a Dartford caught my ear. A few enquiries and apparently it’s been present around 13 months.
The species did breed last year in the East of the county. Hopefully they will do so again this year and the two other remaining males in North Norfolk will manage to attract females and we’ll have a few colonies that will maintain the presence of what are believed to be the most Northerly birds in Europe.
It’s that time of year again. A walk on the heath revealed a few adders including this georgeous female. Normally when there’s a stick in the way I bend down and remove it … I gave it a miss this time.
Lovely sleeping Tawny Owl.
We’ve had a good hoard of owls recently. A Short-eared drifted along the dunes doing its moth like flight impression. A Little Owl popped out of a tree from absolutely nowhere and stared us out with a pair of eyes that would pierce metal and a Tawny Owl was resting in the sun just soaking it all up as only Tawny Owls can. It was the Barn Owls however that just kept on coming that amazed us. Every time we’ve been out lately Barn Owls have popped up in front of us. I guess they have been prevented from hunting with all the rain and wind of late; hunger pushing them out into daylight hours when the weather has been anything like decent. Travelling along the coast the other day we had six. Included in the six, in failing light, was the renowned Barn Owl that hunts the marshes near Cley. The so named ‘Casper’ is a bird lacking in pigment. He really does look very ghost-like; albeit a friendly ghost.
Letter From Norfolk 