Common Nighthawk – near the River Maine, Galgorm, near Ballymena, County Antrim, 10^th October 2019

Having only arrived back from St. Agnes at c.19:30 on Monday the 7th October after an epic Penzance to Edinburgh drive, I was less than enthused by the prospect of another twitch, no matter how enticing the Common Nighthawk in County Antrim, Northern Ireland was.

However, enticed by photos and videos and cajoled by Paul Pugh, I began to casually consider my options on Wednesday the 10th.

I had some constraints as well; Thursday the 11th had been pencilled in as a combined Taiga Bean Goose roost count and although Rick Goater couldn’t make it, Angus Maciver and I remained committed. I had also offered to give Tessa a lift from Dalmeny Railway Station on the evening of Friday 12th. However, my options broadened on the evening of the 10th when Angus messaged me to call off the roost count owing to the weather forecast. Conversely, Tessa messaged me to suggest she wanted a lift but added that she wasn’t able to be specific just yet about when.

When I had eventually clambered out of bed and breakfasted I struggled to settle down to anything too constructive. The nighthawk was still there, and by now I had become preoccupied by it.

There were basically two travel options. These involved driving to Cairnryan and getting the ferry (and presumably taking the car) to Larne, and then driving from Larne to the site near Galgorm near Ballymena, or alternatively, getting a flight from Edinburgh to George Best Belfast City Airport (or better still, it later emerged, Belfast International Airport) and hiring a car (or taking a taxi?) from there to the site.

I decided that the latter was more viable given my time constraints and began investigating the flight options. These involved FlyBe and Easyjet, at least as far as Edinburgh to George Best Belfast City Airport was concerned.

I investigated and permed various times and prices and then plumped for FlyBe flights at 13:25 from Edinburgh to George Best Belfast City Airport and at 20:15 from George Best Belfast City Airport to Edinburgh. I then managed to book a hire car from Sixt for £16.42 to convey me from the airport to the site and from the site to the airport. It was just before 10:00. I booked a taxi to the airport for 12:00 and quickly gathered up my gear; with just a very few hours between flights / on-site this didn’t take too long – I could definitely travel light!

I had a couple of hours to kill, but doing anything vaguely resembling work was not an option. I chose instead to continue writing up the Yellow-billed Cuckoo new species account.

The taxi arrived a little early, but other than chatting about junior women’s football, etc., travelling to the airport, and then checking in / getting my boarding passes, clearing security, etc., was uneventful. Once the gate was announced I made my way there and waited, waited longer than I had envisaged as officially the flight departed at 13:37 rather than 13:25.

However, the flight was uneventful and I was able to disembark reasonably quickly and make my way through the airport. I texted and ‘phoned the Sixt ‘phone number as required to arrange the courtesy bus from the passenger set-down area outside the airport terminal to the Sixt car-hire offices and car-park, etc.. It was sometime after 14:30 by now.

By the time the courtesy bus had arrived and then delivered me and another customer to the Sixt place at Titanic Belfast and we had completed the technicalities, etc., it was sometime after 15:00 when I finally set off for Galgorm.

The journey there went well, although I followed the signs to Galgorm from the A26 rather than continuing onto the A42 and taking that. Possibly as a result, or more likely because the sketch map I had ‘carefully’ prepared related to the wrong road bridge over the River Maine, I made my way to the road bridge over the river on the A42 (rather than road bridge over the river on the minor road of the A42 to the immediate north). As a consequence, I arrived at the entrance to the Wrightbus bus manufacturing works outside Galgorm. As I did, there was a torrential downpour.... . Not good.

Here there was a large picket assembled due to the issues with finding new owners for the bus manufacturers. There were also one or two tripods (which turned out to have been abandoned by the media crews also present....). I hastily parked up and asked one or two of the assembled pickets whether I had found the right place for the rare bird. He suggested I had, so I set off to the bridge and along the riverbank. Somehow the directions on RBA weren’t making sense; I was taking the path alongside the river but was this going north and was it from the west end of the bridge? Google Maps didn’t really help, as it just confused me more. Having walked along a very waterlogged path alongside the river I realised this just wasn’t right and in my confusion I returned to the bridge and walked across it, but very evidently this wasn’t right either. I returned to where I had just been and in the small car-park opposite the entrance to the works there was someone who appeared to be a birder. He was certainly dressed for the weather in camouflage gear and some sort of snood scarf beneath his baseball type hat. As I walked up behind him, it occurred to me I wouldn’t have been doing this 25 years ago, dressed as he was.

He turned out to be a fisherman, but thankfully he knew all about the bird and had wondered what I was doing there when he had seen me previously (presumably he had been sheltering from the rain shower in his car when I had first walked by).

He quickly gave me directions to where I should have been and so I returned to my car and attempted to follow these. Badly. I drove to the roundabout on the other side of the bridge and managed to take the right exit from here, but then omitted to take an immediate left, meaning I carried on way beyond Galgorm before returning and turning right into the minor road I should have been on in the first place.

Almost immediately, I crossed a road bridge over the river, and here it was very apparent that I had found the right place as there were a good few birders cars parked up alongside the road and birders were evident around and about the location. I quickly parked up and assembled my gear. By now I was a tad fraught, and when I crossed the bridge and asked a birder at his car what was going on, to my frustration he started at the very beginning, “Well, there is a rare bird....”, when what I really meant was, “How do I get from here to where the bird was?”

He patiently explained, (as did another birder making his way back as I made my way there), so clambered over the crash barrier at the end of the road-bridge and down onto a muddy path, over a stile and then through one soggy horse field on a semblance of a path to a small foot-bridge over a ditch and into another slightly less soggy horse field. Adjacent to the foot-bridge and ditch was a medium-sized ash tree and the handful of birders in and around the field indicated that the nighthawk was roosting on one of the gently inclined branches of the tree just a few metres from where I was near the bridge. I quickly binned it and then moved out into the field to join the assembled small group of birders viewing from where the light was better out in the field just beyond.

It was now sometime after 16:00. For the next two hours I watched the bird as it slumbered, swayed and shuffled around on the said branch. I mainly watched from the chosen place out in the field, but later on I and the other birders moved from there to a location nearer the adjacent river in anticipation of it leaving roost and beginning hawking over the river.

Sadly for me, it never did, or at least not before I had to leave at around 18:20, when I had just been informed by a recent arrival that it left roost at 18:35 the previous evening.... .

During this time, as suggested, it did very little really, except for providing very good views (as it was unconcerned by us nearby as it relied on its cryptic camouflage).

So, I watched it through my bins, and occasionally through the ‘scopes of other birders, attempted to take suitable images of it with both my camera and my mobile ‘phone and also make sketches of it. And I also chatted to the other birders, who included a few Irish birders from the Republic and three English birders who, like me had flown from the UK, Luton Airport to be exact. Appropriately, the craic with the Irish birders was good, and I enjoyed myself chatting to them, about cross-border twitching, referencing Dennis Weir, who sadly had left Northern Ireland that day for Cape Clear, and as such wasn’t around to help me get the nighthawk.

Occasionally we had to fend off the ever curious horses, and at one point one of the Irish birders trampled my mini-rucksack attempting to avoid the attentions of one of the horses. Concurrently, there were also attempts to take photographs of the horses apparently looking at the bird through ‘scopes. At one stage, the same fisherman appeared, and I was able to thank him for putting me right. He also reiterated the story that fisherman had first seen the bird two or three weeks earlier.

Given the bird was constantly on view for the duration of my stay, and rather inactive, there was plenty of time for both taking it in properly and for chatting, etc.. Towards the end of my stay more birders and local bystanders appeared (as work finished and as its evening performance approached). I chatted to one local, in particular; it was very gratifying to see locals arriving to see this spectacle. Indeed, when I got back to the car there were two or three old dears standing on the bridge waiting for its performance!

As suggested, under the pressure of my 20:15 flight, and therefore a nominal last check-in time of 19:45, I cracked at c.18:20 and left the scene.

Having picked my way through the soggy field and back to the car, I disassembled my gear, and departed the scene. This time I chose to take the A42 through Ballymena back to the A26.

Getting back to Belfast, and indeed beyond the airport and back to a filling station at a Tesco’s on opposite side of the road on the outskirts of Hollywood, went very well. I filled up (or so I thought) and navigated my way back onto the road past the airport. Unfortunately I missed the turn into the Titanic Belfast area where the Sixt office was, causing a rather fraught diversion towards Belfast, which fortunately I was relatively easily able to rectify.

The return of the car went well (and by now the petrol gauge had finally readjusted to register as full). So I then just had to wait for the courtesy bus to appear, which eventually it did (actually it was just a few minutes, but its seemed like longer as it was getting close to 19:45 by now).

Once I had been dropped off back at the passenger set-down area I quickly walked to the check-in desks where I established that as I already had my boarding pass I could simply go straight through to security. This I did without any hassles, so that I nonchalantly strolled into the queue at the gate in what was a very finely timed run..... .

Again, the flight went without any hitches, and once back at Edinburgh Airport I got a taxi home, having a very interesting and depressing chat with the Kurdish driver (given that Turkey was just entering Northern Syria to persecute the Kurds after all they had done to overcome ISIS).

Oh, the bird? Well, although it was perched on a branch a few metres up in an ash tree, it definitely reminded me of the whole experience of finding the Nightjar on the log near the Bain Trap on the Isle of May. It was mostly dark brown with lots of whitish ‘marbling’ and finely barred white under-parts. Beyond this the most notable features were the long curved primaries, the large-ish white flash in the centre of the primaries, a line of bold off-white square-ish patches on the scapulars, and the mustard coloured eye-ring.

All in all, a stupendous bird!!!!! Just a shame I never saw it in flight...... .