Eastern Crowned Warbler – Hunley Golf Course, Brotton, County Durham, 31st October 2014
Unbelievable!!!!!!! I score big time with something I never thought I would have the chance to see again.
As a result of being ‘in a relationship’ I had missed ‘the’ Eastern Crowned Warbler that was at Trow Quarry, South Shields, County Durham between the 22nd and 24th October 2009. As I recall I sacrificed going for it as I was laying a wooden floor in the downstairs shower room and toilet at Elizabeth’s. Shame, because my wooden floor-laying skills seemingly weren’t appreciated anyway. I should have just gone, but these are the compromises you have to make when you are ‘in a relationship’, allegedly.
I just reconciled it to experience and attempted to move on. Like the Long-billed Murrelet (now that was a horrendous error!) I never considered that there might be another.
Late October 2014 hadn’t too thrilling; I was on the comedown after being on St. Agnes with Ken Shaw and Amanda Coia, et al., between the 11th and the 19th October. Once back in Edinburgh October failed to provide any viable distractions from work, and, amongst other things, I completed three surveys at my Old Shields / Castlecary vantage point on the 24th, 27th and 30th October, and completed a Taiga Bean Goose roost count on behalf of Scottish Natural Heritage with Angus Maciver on the 29th October for good measure.
I cannot remember just when the news of the third ever Eastern Crowned Warbler broke relative to my work activities (it possibly wasn’t whilst I was sat at the vantage point as that would have been too much). Anyway, undoubtedly when it did break I calculated that I wouldn’t be able to get there in time that day, so I no doubt opted for my usual, ‘I’ll go if there is news in the morning’ approach.
I think Friday the 31st October wasn’t amounting to too much anyway, so I don’t think I had much to re-arrange; I just prepared and waited, and then departed once the news came through.
After a long and uneventful drive (apart from the frustrating last few miles when I struggled with navigating and driving somewhat) taking something in the order of 3.5 hours, I duly arrived at the golf club car-park, seeing birders in the adjacent landscape planting car-park as I did so. This was where I should have parked (as this was the arrangement that had been made with the golf club, but......).
I quickly joined them without putting on my boots or jacket, etc., (‘twas very mild) and walked into the nearby woodland, which was a mainly deciduous area of semi-mature landscape planting, and began actually looking for the stonker, which few people seemed to be doing.
As a result I found a Chiffchaff away from the scene of sightings of the bird had been congregated. There were one or two Chiffchaffs, etc., which caused minor flurries of excitement but my searches were unsuccessful otherwise. I was intent, though, on not just standing around aimlessly chatting and gawping at where the bird had been; I kept myself away and kept looking.
After searching for a good while I returned to the crowd and in doing so bumped into Jonny Holliday, who had recently arrived (the whole twitch was a bit of a Scillies reunion, as I also saw Alan Goddard and Keith Pendlebury there, both of whom had also recently returned from the Scillies). We searched together for a while before there was a shout as the bird had been relocated; it had returned to its ‘favoured’ area, and here it ‘showed’ allowing us to catch up with it.
In the next half hour or so I saw it on two separate occasions in two different sycamores, but it wasn’t easy and views (bins only) weren’t the best. Jonny and I worked together and helped each other get on it when one of us had it and the other didn’t. The trees were still in a very reasonable amount of leaf, and the birds’ cryptic colouration and somewhat cumbersome ‘stop – start’ feeding habit made it often very difficult to pick out; if it wasn’t moving it disappeared unless you knew just where it was.
But I saw it (especially so at one interlude in one of the sycamores when it briefly co-operated and could be watched reasonably well). I certainly witnessed its ‘stonkiness’, as was sketched at the time.
It had very markedly cold white under-parts, and the upper-parts were grey-green, with more green in the remiges and retrices. It had a stonking head pattern featuring a fuck-off big whitish supercilium emphasised by the dark eye-stripe and crown bordering and framing this. The pale central crown stripe was hard to see, but was seen briefly intermittently. There were two weakish wing-bars. The bill was strongish (almost like that of a vireo, and was yellowish in colour in terms of the lower mandible, and grey in terms of the upper). The legs were yellowish.
After it disappeared again I opted to do likewise after what had been a very successful twitch. I bumped into the fabled Jonny Mac in the car-park (he of the Merlin Surveys in the North York Moors in the 1980s when I was doing Upland Bird Surveys for the Nature Conservancy Council and also ‘Mr’ Birdline North East). He was with his lad and it was excellent to see him, although he was somewhat exercised by having ‘lost’ his mobile so we only chatted briefly.
I then disappeared off to get some well deserved sustenance nearby before driving home, a very happy man....... .
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