The other Tuesday, it was a January Tuesday, I had no clients so decided to treat myself to a proper birding expedition (something I do with increasing irregularity now). I’d got my year list off to a pretty good start early in the month with a walk at Hickling where I’d seen Common Crane, Great White Egret, a distant flying Bittern, a Stonechat and had come across a birder with a telescope who’d kindly let me look at the Brambling he’d found in amongst a small finch flock. But after that the list had stalled. There were birds in North Norfolk that I needed to see.
I parked at Holkham, paid the Earl his car park fee, and walked north towards the beach where a group of eight wintering Shorelarks had been reported daily for several weeks. Holkham is a ‘destination’ and can be alive with people and their dogs, but on a blustery rainy Tuesday by the time I got to the other side of the far dunes there was only one solitary human in sight. The larks are supposed to live in a large roped off area, but as the rope is no barrier to jolly gallivanting dogs they are often not there. They were absent that Tuesday. I marched about scanning the shore and, suaeda marshes, saw various pipits and skylarks, mergansers and scoter on the grey sea, and a far away rainbow.
The afternoon advanced. I bought myself something hot from the Wells-next-the-Sea Deli and moved on to my second destination. I drove up a deeply rutted muddy track off the coast road, parked on one of those sugar beet loading platforms which, when not piled up with beet or other agricultural products make handy car parks for bird watchers. There was a car already there and two others followed me up. The group of us, all much of an age, straggled down the rest of the track, in the now insistent rain, variously covered in telescopes and binoculars and stood together on a little knoll facing the marsh. We knew where to stand because the grass had been trodden flat by other assemblies of birders who’d come to watch the rare bird over the preceding months.
We got wet. There is a brief while when wetness becomes a kind of pleasurable nakedness, but that only lasts while your body heat lasts. My Christmas beanie kept my head warm, my longish hair made a down pipe at the back of my neck for the rain. The wind was in the north-west, an eye of blue in the sky inched towards us and skeins of hundreds of geese flew north to roost on the sand bank off the coast. I used up the pocketfuls of tissues I’d sensibly bought with me, drying my glasses, the lenses of my binoculars and telescope. I had one pocket full of wet tissues, and in the other a diminishing supply of dry ones: soon two pockets full of wet tissues.
An hour passed. We were well down the second one when the rain eased, slowed, stopped. By now I was using corners of clothes to try to dry the optics. A merlin appeared on a distant post, flew obligingly towards us, a barn owl hunted along in the middle distance, a very beautiful male hen harrier drifted east. Then the shout, ‘pallid harrier, by the dead tree’. All I could see in my smeared telescope was a large brown bird. But someone had a dry, more powerful, machine; so I saw what I had come to see, head markings and all.
Michael Mackmin
