WALES has done pretty well for rare birds recently. First, the Alaw Estuary in Anglesey was visited by a Black Stork.
This was a fairly obliging bird, hanging around for plenty of people to see it, even if it did occasionally give everyone the slip briefly by sneaking away into some nearby fields.
Once you see it, you can’t miss a Black Stork: tall and black, with bright red legs, bill and a manic red eye.
No chance of mis-identifiying this bird.
I was already on Anglesey when I heard it was on the estuary again, so I made a short detour to see what I could find.
And thanks to some other birders letting me look through their telescopes (thank you very much, Ken) I could see a very striking bird indeed.
Anglesey's Black Stork - not a brilliant photo, but it's mine!
Him Indoors was just that, stuck indoors in his office, so he wasn’t best pleased that I’d seen the bird and he hadn’t.
Being gripped off, as it’s known in the trade, it can be a very painful condition when a keen birder hasn’t seen a particular bird but his girlfriend has.
So a couple of tense hours passed before he could escape the computer and dash over to see the Black Stork for himself.
Phew!
Sharing the treats around, mid-Wales was graced with a Gull-billed Tern on the Dyfi Estuary.
Another rarity, this Tern looks not too dissimilar to a Sandwich Tern which we see quite frequently along the North Wales coastline, but its call is quite unique, being said to sound like Punch saying to Judy, “That’s the way to do it!”
This I had to hear for myself!
South Wales did even better with a Roller hanging around a farm on the Gower Peninsula for about a week, very obligingly sitting on telegraph wires showing off well to all the birders who went to see it.
Unlike so many of our rather drab-coloured birds, a Roller is a very jazzy number indeed, being generally bright blue-green with a brown back.
With the Black Stork under our belt, we decided to make a day of it and go for the others.
This meant a 4am start, not my favourite time of day but very popular with the local fox population, perhaps another beneficiary of the Council’s economy drive on the refuse collection front.
The roads heading south through Wales, though very scenic, are not the fastest so it was a good three hours before we reached the Dyfi estuary.
Driving towards the beach we saw two raptors perched together on a telegraph pole and wire. Buzzards, we thought, given their posture. But no.
We must have woken them for they suddenly straightened up and showed themselves to be a beautiful pair of Ospreys.
Such an amazing sight so close up!
With this great start, surely our luck was in for birding?
Sadly not. As we started scanning the enormous expanse of marshland at the mouth of the Dyfi river, the news came in that the Roller had disappeared.
It had stayed a week but not a day longer. We’d dipped. Disappointed, we continued to scan the river but the few birds we could see were all gulls.
After two hours of this, we deserted our post seeking breakfast to feed the inner birder.
Fortified with egg and bacon, we returned to the estuary. With no Roller to drive on for, we decided to stay put until we found the Tern.
So we watched and we waited.
And waited.
Birders came and birders went, and still we waited.
By this time, I’ll confess I was turning my bins to other things in search of entertainment. Aberdovey looks very attractive from across the river, and picturesquely, a steam engine puffed its way down the valley into the town.
Gulls seemed to be settling further upstream, too far to see from the beach, so we tried another route to the water to see if we could get a better look.
Armed with bins and scope, we walked about a mile along a footpath to an alternative viewpoint.
Another very pretty spot, where we looked and looked: plenty of Black-headed Gulls, some Little Egrets and two Green Sandpipers, even a Green Crab and some tiny fish, but no Gull-billed Tern.
Eventually we gave up, trudged back to the car and began the three-hour drive home.
Maybe birding isn’t such a good thing after all.
If we hadn’t been looking for the Tern, we’d have said it was a great day out in beautiful countryside and glorious sunshine.
We explored new places, had a picnic beside a river and went home slightly pink from all the fresh air and sunshine.
As it was, we drove home feeling rather disappointed, and the unsuccessful journey seemed even longer on the way back.
But hang on a minute. If it wasn’t for the Tern, would we have still gone out, would we have discovered a new birding spot and would we have enjoyed the most amazing close-up views of Ospreys, not to mention all the other wildlife during the day?
No, on balance I think I’d rather try and miss out, than not try at all.
